One of the world’s premier laboratory science conferences is named for the Steel City — and it’s coming home for the first time in more than a half-century.

The Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry & Spectroscopy is organized almost entirely by volunteers from the region and an office staff in Monroeville. In 2027, for the first time since the late 1960s, it will return to Pittsburgh.

“We talked with the city’s visitors bureau a few years ago, and it didn’t really go anywhere,” said Chuck Gardner, a retired analytical chemist for ChemImage and member of the conference organizing committee. “But we spoke again, got into more detail, toured the convention center, and now we’re signed up for two years.”

A city of science

The conference, also known as “Pittcon,” includes an exposition for analytical chemistry companies’ latest products, a host of educational programs for local teachers and students, and an international forum for industry discussion and debate.

Held for more than 75 years, it demonstrates Pittsburgh’s legacy as the engine for America’s Industrial Revolution.

In 1950, members of two Pittsburgh science organizations — the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh and the Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh — held a conference Downtown. They invited chemists, lab researchers, scientists and educators to come learn about the latest advances in analytic lab equipment.

Most attendees didn’t have to travel far. After World War II, the region was the center of industry in the U.S., full of steel mills, glass factories, mines and oil companies, all with their own labs doing chemical research and development.

The Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, founded in 1913, connected scientists from those companies with educators in academic labs throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania. (The Mellon Institute merged with Carnegie Tech in 1967, creating Carnegie Mellon University.)

Scientists from both of those worlds formed the two chemical societies that began hosting the annual conference.

The Pittsburgh conference grew steadily over the years. But in 1968, a city hotel strike forced it to move from the William Penn Hotel to Cleveland, where it would remain for the next few years.

It grew into the largest science conference in the world — too large, in fact, to return to its hometown, where neither the old convention center nor Downtown hotel space could accommodate it.

By the late 1990s, only a handful of convention centers in the eastern half of the U.S. could handle a conference the size of Pittcon. More than 34,000 conferees and 1,100 chemical companies attended the 1996 conference in Chicago. A frequent sight on the expo floor was a 10-passenger tram ferrying conferees from one end to the other. Pittcon eventually bought a long carpet with a double-yellow line that ran through the center of the expo floor and marked the tram’s path.

The conference rotated among Atlanta, Chicago, New Orleans and Orlando. In the 2010s, Philadelphia joined the rotation.

By 2021, the covid pandemic coincided with several years of steadily declining attendance to start changing the face of not just Pittcon but all large-scale conferences. Two decades earlier, in 2001, attendance numbers had dipped to just over 25,000, and by 2011 that figure was down to 17,199. Conference organizers began looking at some new cities. In 2024, Pittcon was in San Diego. In March, it was held in Boston.

“Over the years, we’ve gotten more economical about what we need for our conference, and we recognize there’s a financial pressure on everybody,” Gardner said. “But, unlike in the days when our attendance was huge, we understand a lot better now what exactly we need to put on the show. We realized that we now know how to put a show in Pittsburgh.”

“We probably could have come back to Pittsburgh a few years ago, but our site selection committee chooses locations six and seven years in advance,” said Brian Strohmeier, who will serve as conference president for the return to Pittsburgh in 2027. “The conference will also be back here in 2030.”

Pittcon spokesman Jon Handel said a big part of bringing the conference home is the buildup of the city’s hosting infrastructure over the past decade — a process that kicked into overdrive with the announcement that the NFL Draft will be held in Pittsburgh in April.

Pittsburgh’s expanded convention center opened in 2003. “It’s a magnificent facility,” Handel said. “You have new hotels and parking growing over the years. And now the NFL Draft has turbocharged that.”

Handel said new host cities also have been chosen based on what sort of science, chemical and tech industry exists there. Boston, like Pittsburgh, has strength in robotics. In 2026, the conference will be in San Antonio.

“They have a significant oil and gas presence, so we’ll be emphasizing that area and trying to expand our reach there,” he said. “In Pittsburgh, we’ll emphasize medical science and robotics.”

Hometown benefits

Compared with cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia, Pittsburgh’s Downtown is smaller, which Gardner and Strohmeier said works to their advantage. “In Downtown Pittsburgh, you can walk from the Strip District to the Point in 15 minutes,” Gardner said.

He also cited the improvements underway at Pittsburgh International Airport, where a new terminal is scheduled to open this year.

Gardner and Strohmeier said they’ve received a warm welcome and a helping hand from the tourism group Visit Pittsburgh.

“We’re excited about it,” said Andrew Ortale, Visit Pittsburgh’s executive vice president for business events and destination experience. “We really pulled everyone together, from the hotels to the convention center, to put our best foot forward and overcome challenges from the past in terms of size and number of hotel rooms.”

Ortale noted the region’s profile has gotten a recent boost from Oakmont Country Club hosting the U.S. Open in June and next year’s NFL Draft. Last fall, Gov. Josh Shapiro unveiled a 10-year plan for $600 million in state, public and private investment to fund improvements to Downtown, with upgrades in public safety and 1,000 new housing units.

“It’s put Pittsburgh back on people’s radar in a way that says: We can host events of significant size,” Ortale said. “And the footprint of our Downtown offers all the amenities of a geographically larger city, in a smaller environment.”

Funding local science

In addition to being planned in Southwestern Pennsylvania, Pittcon has brought millions of dollars in science education funding back to the region through its annual grants and ongoing programs.

“We’ve supported a number of elementary, middle and high schools,” Gardner said. “At elementaries, we’ve supported the Science Olympiad, where kids in small teams have to accomplish a task that requires some science and engineering. How do you best insulate an ice cube to keep it from melting? How do you arrange paper towels so you can drop an egg on them and have it not break?”

The conference has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment grants to support school science programs. (Information about available grants is at ChemistryOutreach.org.)

“We’ve supported a number of lecture series at Pitt, Carnegie Mellon and Duquesne, helping them fund speakers from outside the region,” Gardner said, citing support for a portable planetarium used in astronomy demonstrations at La Roche University and Quaker Valley Middle School.

Ortale said tourism and Pittcon officials both recognized the importance of returning the conference to its hometown.

“This is something that originated here,” Ortale said. “And they felt it was time to come home.”

Strohmeier agreed.

“Returning to Pittsburgh honors the Pittsburgh scientific community that created Pittcon, that has worked diligently over the past 75-plus years to make it one of the premier conferences and exhibitions in the world of analytical chemistry, applied spectroscopy and lab science,” he said.

Pittcon will take place April 24-28, 2027, at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.

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