Current Newsletter 77-05

May 2023

Consider Volunteering for the EAS Virtual Student Symposium May 8th!

Call for Experts! The EAS Virtual Student Symposium (VSS) is looking for analytical scientists across industry, academia, government, and non-traditional routes to network with students presenting at the EAS-VSS this year. To help volunteer, register here: https://eas.org/?p=8907

Feel free to attend the entire event 8 May 2023 from10:00Â A.M. to approximately 4:00 P.M. (TBD, abstract number dependent) or just join the network for the presenters! If you happen to also know a student who may be interested in presenting, abstract submission is open through 1 May at midnight.

Proposal to Our Members and Regional Sections: International Day of Light Outreach

As a long-time National Chemistry and Chemists Celebrate Earth Week demonstrator for the American Chemical Society, I would like to encourage our members and sections to create outreach programs in our areas to promote the field of spectroscopy and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy. To start, the Cincinnati Tri-State local section has created an outreach event for the International Day of Light (IDL) to be held at the Cincinnati Museum Center (CMC) on 13 May 2023. IDL celebrates the anniversary of the first successful operation of the laser in 1960 by physicist and engineer Theodore Maiman. We will have several demo stations in the CMC's STEM Lab to engage their visitors. Fluorescence, infrared, Raman, and visible spectroscopy experiments are planned, and I will share our activities in my next article. One sneak peek at our plans to spark your interestâ€¦one of our volunteers has a handheld Raman unit. We will be sharing how easy it is for spectroscopy to identify plastics that go into recycling systems, besides using the numbers that are hard to find and read, and why there are all the different numbers to help with sorting. Stay tuned and think about joining our efforts in your hometown and write about it for our newsletter. Celebrate!! Check out their website to learn more about IDL: https://www.lightday.org/

Contributed by Gloria Story, SAS President-Elect

2023 Pittcon Recap

For those who attended Pittcon 18–22 March 2023, on behalf of SAS I would like to say it was a wonderful experience to see many faces at this meeting after the last few years of virtual content. As noted in the Early Career recap (see below), SAS sponsored one networking session at the meeting with an emphasis on early career engagement. SAS technical affiliate, the Coblentz Society, presented their 2023 Williams-Wright Award to Dr. Craig Prater of Photothermal Spectroscopy Corporation, along with organizing an invigorating technical session focusing on AFM-IR, O-PTIR, and instrumentation development.

Many SAS members had talks, and some gave short courses (see March 2023 Newsletter), so SAS' presence was known throughout the meeting. The SAS booth was located approximately in the middle of the exposition floor, which means it was pretty easy to find from either direction of the hall. SAS would love to hear ideas about technical symposia to help sponsor at 2024 Pittcon in San Diego, California. So feel free to contact the SAS office or Gloria Story with your proposal!


2023 Williams-Wright symposium speakers from left to right: 2023 Coblentz President, Zac Schultz, Rohit Reddy, Andrea Centrone, Craig Prater, Roy Goodacre, Ferenc Borondics.	SAS President-Elect Gloria Story supervising the booth at Pittcon 2023.

Becoming a Peer Reviewer for Our Journals

If you are interested in becoming a peer reviewer, a good first step is to attend one of SAGE's webinars on this topic. See: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/how-to-be-a-peer-reviewer-webinar

SAGE's free webinar series will guide you through the process of conducting peer review, including how to get started, basic principles of reviewing articles, what journal editors expect from reviewers, and important considerations such as research ethics and reviewer responsibilities.

In 2023, SAGE is hosting three webinars at different times so our audience around the world can join at an appropriate time. We'll be joined by Publishing Editors from across the globe to provide insight on how to excel as a peer reviewer.

Early Career Recap of Pittcon 2023

The Early Career Interest Group (ECIG) would like to send out a special "Thank You!" to everyone who made it out for our joint social event with the Student Section of SAS and Coblentz Society. This special event was held at McGillin's Old Ale House on Monday night at Pittcon. Despite a last-minute change to the choice of venue, the event had a good turnout, and it provided a relaxing forum to meet up with fellow spectroscopists.

We would also like to thank everyone who showed their support and joined us at our networking session on the topic "Leveraging Your Online Presence to Foster a Successful Career in Spectroscopy". The event was hosted by Fay Nicolson, chair of the ECIG.

The ECIG are in now in the planning stages for social events and a special Early Career session at SciX 2023. Watch for more details to be released in upcoming newsletters!

Do you have something spectroscopy-related you want to discuss in the newsletter? Or something that will help our membership such as career tips or application tips? Please let us know by emailing luisaprofeta@gmail.com.