Camera developer Princeton Instruments has introduced the Scholars Grant Program, a financial assistance program for researchers and educators who are seeking the latest high-performance spectroscopy tools for their labs and classrooms. A limited number of financial assistance grants will be awarded based on the scientific merit of the applicant’s research as well as innovative use of optical UV-VIS-NIR spectroscopy. Each of the gold, silver or bronze financial assistance grants, worth $10,000, $5,000 and $2,500, respectively, is redeemable towards the purchase of a new Princeton Instruments FERGIE spectroscopy system. The aberration-free FERGIE spectrograph features a built-in, low-noise, cooled detector along with its own specially engineered ecosystem of accessories which includes elegant light-coupling cubes, laser sources, fiber optics and software. FERGIE facilitates applications such as Raman spectroscopy, absorption and transmission spectroscopy, microspectroscopy, time-resolved spectroscopy and fluorescence spectroscopy. “Experiments that would otherwise require hours of labor before any spectral data could be acquired now take only a few minutes to set up,” explains Ravi Guntupalli, vice president of sales and marketing at Princeton Instruments. “FERGIE arrives ready to use right out of the box. There’s no need to mess around with alignments or calibrations. This ingenious new system really does change the way scientific spectroscopy is done.” In addition to the financial assistance grants being made available for the purchase of FERGIE spectrographs, Princeton Instruments’ new Scholars Grant Program will provide a limited number of travel assistance grants. The awards, worth up to $500 each, are being offered to help students cover conference travel expenses when they are presenting spectroscopy-related papers. Application forms and more information on the grant program can be found at www.princetoninstruments.com/fergie. Princeton Instruments designs and manufactures high-performance CCD, ICCD, EMCCD, emICCD, InGaAs, and back-illuminated sCMOS cameras; high-throughput spectrographs; complete spectroscopy systems; and optics- based solutions for the scientific research, industrial imaging and OEM communities.