Richard Crocombe

Richard Crocombe has been active in SAS’s New England Section for many years, including being its chair twice, and its regular delegate to the Governing Board.  With Mark Druy, he was the guest editor for Applied Spectroscopy in May 2016, an issue concentrating on portable spectroscopy.

Richard’s education was in chemistry and spectroscopy at Oxford University, and then the University of Southampton, where he did his Ph.D. with Prof. Ian Beattie, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Gleb Mamantov, working on FT-IR spectroscopy, infrared laser photochemistry, time resolved spectroscopy and gas chromatography/FT-IR. 

His industrial career has focused on product development and commercialization of new technologies and applications, and for the past 15 years, on handheld and portable spectroscopy. 

At Bio-Rad Digilab Division this included applying digital signal processing techniques to step-scan applications, and commercialization of mid-IR FT-IR spectroscopic imaging. At Axsun Technologies, he took their chip-sized near-infrared tunable laser module into analytical and process spectroscopy. He then joined Thermo Fisher Scientific’s handheld x-ray fluorescence business, and this lead to the acquisitions of Ahura Scientific and Polychromix.  He then moved to PerkinElmer to integrate the just-acquired Torion Technologies portable GC/MS technology, and left in 2017 to set up his own spectroscopic consulting company.

He was previously secretary of the Coblentz Society, and is a current board member.  In addition, he is co-chair of SPIE’s ‘Next-Generation Spectroscopic Technologies’ conferences, and co-editor of the resulting conference proceedings publications. He received the Williams-Wright Award for Industrial Spectroscopy in 2013.