Professor Cheng Receives Spectrochemical Analysis Award
By Lea Rivel
Professor Ji-Xin Cheng has been named the recipient of this year’s American Chemical Society Division of Analytical Chemistry Spectrochemical Analysis Award, which will be presented at the Fall ACS meeting in Denver, Colorado. This honor is awarded to those whose work has advanced the fields of spectrochemical analysis and optical spectrometry through instrumentation, novel methodologies, influential publications, and the illumination of fundamental processes.
Working at the forefront of chemical imaging, Cheng and his team have pioneered the development of bond-selective microscopy, utilizing fingerprint spectroscopic signals to map molecular interactions inside a living system or organism both temporally and spatially. His team’s research has consistently broken the fundamental limits of chemical microscopy, making new scientific discoveries via keen observation of subtleties, as well as cross-disciplinary collaborations. Cheng and his group invented the mIRage system, a series of vibrational photothermal microscopes that enable high-speed, high-resolution chemical-bond imaging at micromolar detection sensitivity. The system, commercialized by Photothermal Spectroscopy Corp, is used in hundreds of labs in over 15 countries.
Professor Cheng is the recipient of the 2024 SPIE Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award, as well as the 2024 DeLisi Award from BU’s College of Engineering. He is the inaugural Moustakas Chair Professor of Photonics and Optoelectronics, and has more than 300 published articles, 30 patents and multiple companies to his name. He focuses much of his work on imaging technology for biomedical applications, and has had notable success in bringing the products of academic research to industry and commercial production. In 2022, Cheng was named Boston University’s Innovator of the Year in honor of this affinity for practical research applications. Other recent honors include the 2020 Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award and the 2019 Ellis R. Lippincott Award. He is a Fellow of both Optica and AIMBE. Cheng holds additional appointments in Biomedical Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Photonics Center. He received his PhD from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1998.