What Short Courses Will Be Available at SciX 2026?

In October, the annual SciX 2026 Conference will return to Sparks, Nevada, at the Nugget Casino Resort, which was the host of the 2023 iteration of the conference.¹ The conference program will comprise of oral symposia, award presentations, poster sessions, and short courses.¹

In this article, we preview the short courses that attendees will have the chance to participate in at the conference.

What are the short courses that will take place at SciX 2026?

There will be 11 short courses hosted over a four-day period. These courses are designed to give analytical chemists, spectroscopists, and materials scientists information about important techniques and topics in the field, including Raman spectroscopy, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), and ultraviolet–visible–near-infrared (UV-vis-NIR) spectroscopy.² The courses are scheduled Sunday through Wednesday ahead of the conference's main technical sessions, which gives attendees the chance to go to both without making a choice.²

What short courses are taking place on Sunday?

On Sunday, there is one short course that is a full-day course. The topic is on multivariate data analysis, covering techniques for interpreting complex data sets and building predictive models.² Multivariate analysis is used in various industries, including food and beverage, pulp and paper, pharmaceuticals, and refining.² The conference organizers also noted that participants will receive a temporary software license ahead of the course for installation on their own computers so that they can follow on in a hands-on manner.²

What short courses are taking place on Monday?

On Monday October 5, there will be one full-day course offering and two half-day course offerings. The full-day course will focus on Raman spectrometer selection, configuration, and optimization.² Course participants will learn concepts such as choosing an excitation wavelength, spectral and spatial resolution, and measurement parameters.²

Meanwhile, the two half-day courses will tackle topics such as Design of Experiments (DOE), which teaches participants to construct efficient experimental designs and analyze results with statistical rigor while conserving resources, and a course on searching infrared (IR) and Raman spectra, which examines how search algorithms perform against unknown compounds and spectral mixtures.²

What short courses are taking place on Tuesday?

There are four courses set to take place on Tuesday October 6^th at the SciX Conference, one full-day course and three half-day courses. The full-day course will be an introduction on data analytics for analytical chemists. Because data analysis is a growing area, this course will be relevant for many researchers in the industry. This course is designed for participants who have little or no background in coding.²

Meanwhile, the three half-day courses on Tuesday will cover topics such as miniature optical spectrometers and spectroscopic sensors, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), and microspectroscopy. The miniature optical spectrometers and spectroscopic sensors course will trace the shrinking of instruments from lab-scale to chip-sized sensors now embedded in consumer devices such as washing machines and smartwatches.² The LIBS short course will cover plasma generation, instrumentation, and chemometric and machine-learning (ML) approaches to data processing, with applications spanning materials characterization, environmental monitoring, cultural heritage, and space exploration.² And finally, the microspectroscopy course will focus on the role of microscope optics in acquiring high-quality spectral data.²

What short courses are taking place on Wednesday?

There will be three short courses on Wednesday, and all of them will be half-day courses. The first course will be on the internal workings of spectrometers and interferometers, addressing instrument limitations such as resolution, noise, and dynamic range.² The second short course, titled “Beyond the Cuvette," extends UV-Vis-NIR spectroscopy instruction past standard liquid measurements into solids, coatings, films, powders, and scattering materials, covering accessories such as integrating spheres and diffuse and specular reflectance.² The third course addresses foreign material identification and root cause analysis in materials manufacturing, applying spectroscopy and microscopy to diagnose contamination, equipment failures, and process deviations.²

The short course slate reflects a recurring emphasis at SciX on pairing instrumentation fundamentals with data analysis skills, as spectroscopic techniques increasingly generate large data sets that require statistical and computational tools to interpret. Registration details, instructor information, and scheduling for each course are available through the SciX Conference program.

References

1. Wetzel, W.; Spectroscopy Staff. Previewing the Upcoming 2026 SciX Conference. Spectroscopy Online, 2026. https://www.spectroscopyonline.com/view/previewing-the-upcoming-2026-scix-conference (accessed September 10, 2026).
2. SciX Conference, Short Course Descriptions. SciX Conference, 2026. Available at: https://scixconference.org/resources/2026%20-%20SciX/Short%20Courses/Short%20Course%20Descriptions_Update.pdf (accessed September 10, 2026).