X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is a characterization technique that is sensitive to local electronic and atomic structure, and has been important for discovering and understanding functional materials for a wide range of energy applications, such as CO 2 capture by metal oxide nanoparticles , solar water splitting , and catalysis . It is particularly suitable as a local probe thanks to its general robustness, large signal-to-noise ratio , element specificity, and unique sensitivity to the chemical environments of absorbing atoms . A given XAS spectrum is unique to the absorbing atom and the edge energy (from which a core electron is excited), and can be divided into the X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) and extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) regions. Each region carries unique information about the environment of absorbing atoms. Among other things, XANES encodes symmetry and electronic structure information of the absorbing site, while EXAFS expresses the structure of excitations and back-scattering at photoelectron energies exceeding the threshold for ionization , thus containing information about neighboring atoms and excited state phenomena. Because XANES spectra have an inherently higher signal-to-noise ratio, they can be sampled in orders of magnitude less time compared to EXAFS. Targeted spectrum-property signatures accessible via XANES could thus enable high-throughput experiments by targeting maximally informative regions of interest. The impact of automation in analysis and extraction of new spectrum-property trends make advances in XANES characterization highly desirable to the community.