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Welcome to the Nanomaterials and Spectroscopy Lab led by Dr. Xiangcheng Sun and located in Institute Hall at RIT.

Group in 12/2025

The lab is focused on the development of nanomaterials for sensing, imaging and catalysis applications through investigating the spectroscopy properties in both ensemble and single-molecule level. Our goal is to explore new approaches for chemical and biomedical monitoring and chemical processing. 

Lab Updates/News

  • 11/2025: Nazanin attended the 2025 AIChE Annual Meeting in Boston, and gave two talks on our research discoveries. In addition, she was selected as a finalist for Graduate Student Awards (Electronics and Photonic Materials) at the meeting. 

  • 09/2025: Xiangcheng named a Scialog Fellow in Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials. 

  • 08/2025: Xiangcheng participated in the Rising Stars of Analytical Chemistry seminar during ACS Fall 2025.

  • 04/2025: Our group made an exhibit on "Seeing Science in Color" at the Imagine RIT festival.  

  • 04/2025: Wendy Boice received Undergraduate Research Achievement Award at the 2025 ACS Rochester Collegiate Research Symposium. 

  • 04/2025: Xiangcheng is featured as New Principal Investigator from Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). Please see the blog post.

  • Meet Xiangcheng Sun: New Principal Investigator03/2025: Koki's first manuscript is accepted and published in Materials Advances. Congrats! Materials Advances, 2025, DOI: 10.1039/D5MA00021A. 

  • 09/2024: Koki, Mason and Brian gave oral and poster presentations at NYSP2I Student and Faculty Research Program Symposium in Troy, NY. 

  • students presentations

    05/2024: Xiangcheng receives one research award sponsored by NYSP2I (funded by NYSDEC). Look forward to having several undergraduates on this project in the lab soon. 

  • 03/2024: Our lab receives one FEAD grant. Congrats. 

  • 01/2024: Our research is featured as a journal cover and published in ACS Applied Optical Materials. Please see more information on our cover https://pubs.acs.org/toc/aaoma6/2/1. 

    01/2024: Nazanin's first research paper is accepted for publication in ACS Applied Optical Materials. Congratulations, Nazanin. 

    11/2023: Xiangcheng was invited to write a Behind-the-Paper post at Springer Nature, Chemistry Community. The post appears "Single-molecule fluorescence imaging and sequencing of single synthetic polymers".

    11/2023: Xiangcheng's paper "Optical sequencing of single synthetic polymers" is finally published online on Nature Chemistry. 

    08/2023: Koki Sekioka joins RIT as a PhD student in our lab. Welcome. He obtained his BS degree in Biomedical Chemistry from Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan.

  • 06/2023: Xiangcheng's (co-1st) paper is accepted by Nature Chemistry. Congrats. 

  • 05/2023: Congratulations to Allora on the acceptance of her paper on ferrous ions detection using green fluorescent carbon dots by Talanta Open. 

  • 01/2023: We welcome Rex Bartolini, a first-year Ph.D. student to join us for rotations. Rex obtained his BS/MS degree from our department at RIT.

  • 01/2023: Our invited review paper on Fluorescent Carbon Dots for Super-Resolution Microscopy is accepted and published in Materials.

  • 10/2022: Dr. Sun is awarded a grant from ACS Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator to support the single-molecule catalysis work. Many thanks to ACS PRF for supporting our work. 

  • 09/2022: We welcome Nazanin Mosleh joining us for her PhD research. Nazanin obtained her MS degree in Inorganic Chemistry from Kharazmi University in Iran.  

  • 03/2022: Dr. Sun receives Grant Writers' Boot Camp See Funding.  

  • 03/2022: Dr. Sun is invited to give a talk in the Department of Chemistry at Xijiao Liverpool University via Zoom.  

  • 10/2021: Our first paper at RIT on glucose detection through SERS was accepted in Analytica Chmica Acta.

  • 08/2021: Dr. Sun joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at RIT and the lab opened.

We thank the following sponsors for supporing our research

NYSP2I   ACS PRF    RIT