This special section brings together papers presented at the fNIRS 2016 conference ( http://www.fnirs2016.org/) held in October 2016 in Paris, as well as other contributed papers on near-infrared spectroscopy. The conference had sessions covering the development and use of NIRS spanning the topics of neurodevelopment, brain and systemic physiology, clinical applications, multimodal monitoring, hardware development, global fNIRS, neonatal and pediatric applications, data analysis, and neurocognition.

The following six papers are published as Part 1 of the special section. The second part, expected to appear in the October–December 2017 issue, will contain the rest of the papers and will be accompanied by a full editorial.