New York / New Jersey Section of SAS Gold Medal Award

Gold Medal Award: New York/New Jersey SAS sponsors the Gold Medal award, recognizing outstanding contributions in the field of Applied Spectroscopy. The Gold Medal will be presented at a special award symposium, arranged in honor of the awardee, at the Eastern Analytical Symposium. 

2026 Award Winner

The New York / New Jersey Section of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy is pleased to honor the 2026 recipient of the Gold Medal Award, Dr Richard Crocombe of Crocombe Spectroscopic Consulting. Dr. Crocombe is recognized for his many contributions to applied spectroscopy, particularly in the development of portable spectroscopy. The award presentation will be held at the Eastern Analytical Symposium (EAS) on Tuesday, November 17, 2026, at the Crowne Plaza Princeton Conference Center in Plainsboro, NJ. Dr. Crocombe will deliver an award address in a technical session organized in his honor. We invite all interested parties to attend the session. Please access the EAS weblink for details.

ABSTRACT

Portable spectroscopic instruments have developed very rapidly over the last twenty years, becoming smaller, lighter, yet more versatile and ‘smarter’, providing actionable information

for the operator. Recent developments include integration with unmanned platforms and a portable hyperspectral Raman instrument. Developments in photonics (SPAD arrays, metamaterials, photonic integrated circuits, etc.) will flow into portable spectrometers in the near future. Beyond the hardware, the importance of applications development to the success of a portable instrument cannot be understated. Fully-integrated portable spectrometers are designed to give reliable, actionable information to their operators, who are likely to be non-scientists. Many technologies have enabled, and continue to enable, the development of these instruments. In order to generate the desired information for the operator, the portable instrument is more than just the ‘engine’: it has to be designed to run in the field, to be operated using gloves, and have embedded spectral libraries or quantitative calibration, with appropriate algorithms. These applications have to process the spectrum or spectra to generate the result, without any operator intervention. With that in mind, this talk will discuss the key field applications of portable spectrometers touching on safety & security; military; hazmat; narcotics; counterfeits; food, feed and agriculture; recycling, asbestos; cannabis, etc. We will also discuss unexpected applications of portable spectroscopy, including the rapidly growing area of ‘wearables’ and other examples of ‘wellness’ devices, including smart toilets. We will conclude with a discussion of how to succeed with miniature and portable spectrometers.

BIOGRAPHY

Richard Crocombe is the Principal at Crocombe Spectroscopic Consulting. In this capacity, he advises early stage, mature and end user companies on the technologies and applications of portable spectrometers, and go-to-market strategies.

Prior to this he worked at a number of companies, including Bio-Rad, Thermo Fisher Scientific and PerkinElmer on the development of new spectrometers and their applications, and worked extensively with portable spectrometers, including Raman, mid-infrared, near-infrared, XRF and GC/MS.

He is a Fellow of SPIE, and for ten years was chair of the ‘Next-Generation Spectroscopic Technologies’ conference. He is a former President (2020) of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy, and as the founding Editor-in-Chief of SAS’s second scientific journal (“Applied Spectroscopy Practica”). He is a former board member and secretary of The Coblentz Society.

He has published extensively on the technologies and applications of miniature and portable spectrometers, including a comprehensive review article in Applied Spectroscopy in 2018, downloaded over 36,000 times. Richard Crocombe, Pauline Leary and Brooke

Kammrath are the joint editors of the two-volume book, ‘Portable Spectroscopy and Spectrometry’, published by John Wiley in April 2021. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardcrocombe/