Vol 35 No s2 Raman Technology for Today's Spectroscopists

An upcoming interview with Ji-Xin Cheng, a Theodore Moustakas Distinguished Professor in Photonics and Optoelectronics at Boston University, will highlight his ongoing work in coherent Raman scattering microscopy.

Reliability, dynamic measurements, artificial intelligence, and real-world applications are reshaping Raman spectroscopy – while Molecular Photonics points toward new translational frontiers.

Jurgen Popp, Thomas Mayerhofer, and colleagues at Leibniz IPHT and Friedrich Schiller University Jena introduce the Personalized Optical Digital Twin (PODT), a Photonics21 contribution to Europe's Virtual Human Twin ecosystem that connects molecular photonics—Raman blood analysis, coherent Raman tissue imaging, and multimodal endomicroscopy—with longitudinal physiology and clinical data. Drawing on the published multicenter INTELLIGENCE trials, the authors argue that technical feasibility and clinical utility must be evaluated separately as the field moves toward Europe's FP10 research agenda.

The Peter Griffiths Award, named for the legendary infrared spectroscopist, recognizes the best paper published annually in Applied Spectroscopy Practica. Its inaugural recipients, Sara Fraser-Miller and coauthors, will be honored at SciX 2026, and the journal is now accepting 2026 submissions for the third award.

Jay P. Kitt, a University of Utah research assistant professor who has spent a decade extending confocal Raman microscopy from phospholipid membranes to nucleic acids and peptide-membrane interactions, is the recipient of Spectroscopy's 2026 Emerging Leader in Molecular Spectroscopy Award.

A proof-of-concept study combines a convolutional neural network feature extractor with the conventional hit quality index (HQI) to improve Raman spectral comparison, reducing spurious similarity and improving discrimination between closely related protein and antibody spectra.

Top content published this week include a historical examination of the James L. Waters Symposium, an obituary of Peter Griffiths, and an article examining Raman spectroscopy instrumentation.

A new peer-reviewed article discusses how pairing quantum mechanics with nanomaterial-based Raman spectroscopy has significantly boosted the technique's sensitivity.