Top articles include the publication of a new terminology guide focused on data processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and chemometrics.
|Articles|May 4, 2022
Spectroscopy Magazine Announces the 2022 Emerging Leader in Molecular Spectroscopy
Lu Wei, PhD, an assistant professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, has won the 2022 Emerging Leader in Molecular Spectroscopy Award, which is presented by Spectroscopy magazine.
Advertisement
Lu Wei, PhD, an assistant professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, has won the 2022 Emerging Leader in Molecular Spectroscopy Award, which is presented by Spectroscopy magazine. This annual award recognizes the achievements and aspirations of a talented young molecular spectroscopist, selected by an independent scientific committee. The award will be presented to Wei at the SciX 2022 conference this fall, where she will give a plenary lecture and be honored in an award symposium.
Wei’s work focuses on the development and application of stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy for bioanalysis, spectroscopy-informed design of vibrational imaging probes, and sample-engineering strategies. Wei has already made several seminal contributions in the field of nonlinear Raman spectromicroscopy, to push the next frontier of nonlinear biological Raman imaging.
Wei received her PhD in 2015 from Columbia University. During her PhD work, Wei pioneered a bio-orthogonal chemical imaging platform that coupled stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) with small bio-orthogonal probes and allowed noninvasive imaging of metabolic dynamics in live cells and tissues with high spatial and temporal resolution, for investigations of cellular metabolism.
She further developed a super-multiplexed optical imaging strategy that exploited a unique pre-resonance SRS excitation region and achieved remarkable sensitivity with up to 24-plex imaging.
Since starting her independent career at the California Institute of Technology in 2018, Wei has been working to develop next-generation Raman microscopy to achieve unprecedented resolution, sensitivity, and multiplexity with improved molecular precision and quantification for complex bioanalysis. One of her key contributions is the development of super-multiplexed and super-resolution vibrational microscopy for subcellular structure–function phenotyping in a complex cellular and tissue environment. Toward this end, she devised a sample-engineering label-free super-resolution SRS imaging strategy and obtained the first multiplexed imaging to within a spatial resolution of 100 nm. In parallel, she also pioneered the development of advanced vibrational probes (such as a photoactivatable and photoswitchable Raman probe), which is a significant component for achieving super-multiplexed and super-resolution vibrational microscopy.
Wei has also pioneered a selective deuterium strategy that allowed the first in situ live-cell quantification and spectral analysis of aggregate composition from native polyQ aggregates, the key hallmark for Huntington’s disease. In addition, she further developed and applied subcellular Raman spectromicroscopy with data mining cross-correlation to transcriptomics and lipidomics for Raman-guided subcellular pharmacometabolomics for metastatic melanoma.
Wei has published 28 papers with 1913 citations and has given 30 oral presentations at scientific conferences. She is a reviewer for multiple journals, including, among others, Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Chemical Science, Angewandte Chromatographie, ChemComm, the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, the Journal of Physical Chemistry B, Small, Langmuir, ACS Omega, Theranostics, Optics Express, Optics Letters, and Biomedical Optics Express.
She is also the organizer of a symposium planned for the 2023 Fall ACS conference on optical spectroscopy and microscopy across biological scales.
Wei has also won several other honors and awards. She was named a Sloan Research Fellow in Chemistry in 2022 and a Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator at Caltech in 2021. She was twice named a Scialog Fellow: in 2021, for advanced bioimaging, and in 2018 for chemical machinery of the cell. She also received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the Amgen Early Innovator Award, a Blavatnik Regional Awards for Young Scientists, in chemistry, from the New York Academy of Sciences, and an American Chemical Society PHYS Division Young Investigator Award.
For information about how to nominate a candidate for the 2023 award, please see the
Advertisement
Related to this article
This column shows that a Raman plate reader paired with partial least squares regression can simultaneously quantify glucose, fructose, sucrose, and ethanol in yeast fermentation samples, using turbidity-matched calibration standards to correct for yeast-induced turbidity, and offers a rapid, label-free, high-throughput method for tracking sugar consumption and ethanol production in strain screening, media optimization, and process development.
Mammograms can find breast microcalcifications but can’t tell whether they are likely benign or malignant.
In a SciX interview, Marc Porter covered a lot of ground, from a student-driven pivot into immunoassays to a baseball analogy for Stokes and anti-Stokes scattering, and shares the open questions he is still chasing.
Microspectroscopy, the marriage of spectroscopic chemical identification with microscopic spatial resolution, has advanced from Perkin-Elmer's first commercial infrared microspectrometer in 1953 to today's nanoscale AFM-IR probes, synchrotron-brightness infrared beamlines, and compact hyperspectral tissue imaging devices being developed for AI-assisted cancer detection.
The 2026 first edition of Spectroscopy's Chemometrics, Data Processing, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence Terminology Guide defines the classical chemometric, statistical, machine learning, AI, and process analytical technology (PAT) terms most likely to be encountered by working spectroscopists, analytical chemists, and process engineers.
In this Q&A, we recap the October edition of “What’s Nu,” which covered topics such as how novel spectroscopic and analytical methods are transforming environmental monitoring, medical treatment, and accessibility in scientific research.
In this Q&A article, we highlight several prominent researchers being recognized at the 2026 SciX Conference for their significant contributions to spectroscopy and photonics and discuss what these researchers talked about at the conference.
Advertisement
Advertisement