Congratulations to the winners of the eleventh annual Microscopy Today Innovation Awards competition. We thank all of the individuals, corporations, and institutions that submitted applications to this competition. Many of the submissions over the last decade, even if they did not win an award, were subsequently published as articles within these pages. Those articles provided descriptions of devices and methods useful to microscopists—a key objective of this publication.
As always, our team of judges, led by Tom Kelly, looked for innovations that will make new scientific investigations possible. The ten winning innovations below were selected based on their usefulness to the microscopy community and their probable importance for future research. The entries most likely to win are those that provide better, faster, easier, or entirely new methods of analysis using some type of microscope or microanalytical instrument.
The 2020 Microscopy Today Innovation Award winners are:
Boston University for development of the Bond-Selective Transient Phase Microscope
Confocal.nl for development of the Re-scan confocal upgrade for imaging deep into tissue
DENSsolutions for development of the Stream System for liquid phase microscopy
Euclid Techlabs, NIST, and Brookhaven National Lab for development of a Retrofittable solution for ultra-fast electron microscopy
Nanolive for development of the CX-A, a non-invasive live cell imaging method for continuous organelle monitoring
NIH–NIBIB for development of Software for accelerating iterative deconvolution and multiview fusion
ORNL, Univ. Illinois (Chicago), and Nion for development of Isotope-Resolved Electron Energy-Loss Spectroscopy
Pohang University of Science and Technology and Opticho for development of Label-free super-resolution Localization Photoacoustic Microscopy
Sigray, Inc. for development of PrismaXRM, an X-ray microscope that overcomes resolution limitations
Carl Zeiss for development of the ORION NanoFab SIMS, a nano-FIB with analysis by mass spectrometry
An article within this issue provides descriptions of these innovations. Nomination applications for the next competition are available upon request (charles.lyman@lehigh.edu). The deadline for submission is March 22, 2021.
