Pittcon Preview: What to Expect from the 75th Annual Conference

The 75th Annual Pittcon Conference and Expositionis taking place from February 24–28, 2024, in San Diego, California. The event will feature numerous awards and talks from analytical scientists in industry, academia, and national laboratories.

The event will kick off with the Wallace H. Coulter lecture, which features an individual who has demonstrated a lifetime commitment and made important contributions that have had a significant impact on education, practice and research in laboratory science. Omowunmi Sadik, distinguished professor and director of The BioSMART Center at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), will deliver the lecture this year. Sadik’s talk will focus on the use of sustainable nanomaterials for understanding reaction mechanisms, small-scale synthesis, and biosensing.

The conference also includes several awards focused specifically on spectroscopy, including the Coblentz Society’s Williams-Wright Award, which honors an industrial spectroscopist who has made significant contributions to vibrational spectroscopy while working in industry. The 2024 Williams-Wright Award winner is Jun Zhao, the director of engineering at Metrohm Spectro. Zhao’s work focuses on Raman spectroscopy instrumentation and methods.

The Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award will also be presented at the conference. This award, established in 1957, is presented annually to a researcher who has demonstrated outstanding achievements in the field of spectroscopy. This year, Vicki H. Grassian, distinguished professor and distinguished chair in physical chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego, will be honored. Grassian’s group focuses on the chemistry and impacts of environmental interfaces as it relates to atmospheric aerosols, engineered and geochemical nanomaterials, and indoor surfaces.

The conference also features several sessions focused on the latest advances in spectroscopy. A session led by Dmitry Kurouski, a professor at Texas A&M University and the winner of Spectroscopy’s 2023 Emerging Leader in Molecular Spectroscopy Award, will focus on infrared and Raman chemical imaging at the nanoscale, atomic force microscopy- infrared spectroscopy (AFM-IR), and tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS). These are emerging analytical techniques that have single-molecule sensitivity and sub-nanometer spatial resolution. There will also be a session on novel spectroscopic approaches, which will feature speakers from industry and academia discussing techniques such as infrared correlation nanoscopy and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy.

Pittcon attendees also have the option to attend several networking workshops throughout the week. These sessions offer an opportunity to connect with other professionals who share similar interests, and will focus on hot topics in analytical chemistry, including cannabis and forensics.

Attendees can also network in the exhibit hall. This year, the event exhibit hall will include booths from companies such as PerkinElmer, Shimazu Scientific Instruments, Metrohm, and more. Attendees can visit Spectroscopy at booth 1042 to speak with the editors and pick up a copy of the magazine.