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The Research Institute for Fragrance Materials (RIFM) is proud to announce that Senior Scientist Holger Moustakas, PhD, and Senior Associate Scientist Jake Muldoon, PhD, were selected to present their latest research during the prestigious Sci-Mix Poster Session at the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Fall 2025 Meeting in Washington, DC. The Sci-Mix session, held Monday evening, highlighted a curated selection of the most notable posters across the entire conference.

Drs. Moustakas (right, above) and Muldoon’s (left, above) presentation focused on chemical clustering and read-across in the safety assessment of natural complex substances (NCS). Using both agglomerative and divisive hierarchical clustering, they evaluated 35 materials across Citrus, Lavandula, and Mentha genera, including essential oils, absolutes, and concretes.

Their findings show that NCS cannot be grouped solely by genus; rather, deeper compositional similarities drive clustering. This research demonstrates how clustering can help identify toxicologically similar groups of NCS, paving the way for more efficient read-across strategies and advancing the scientific foundation of fragrance safety.

The next phase of this work will expand the methodology to more than 500 NCS in the RIFM database.