The first MSA Special Symposium honors Professor Archie Howie CBE FRS for his pioneering contributions to the physics and applications of electron microscopy, initially in TEM and more recently also for SEM; and his leadership, outstanding teaching and wide ranging collaborations in these and related fields.

Professor Howie’s important contributions have included fundamental studies of diffraction contrast effects in the TEM which have been extensively leveraged in numerous applications and collaborations, by Howie, his coworkers and many others. They have had a major impact in column approximations, an early discovery of the weak beam effect in many beam computer simulations of coherency strain contrast and subsequent advances in dislocation weak beam imaging, and the first identification of 311 planar defects in irradiated Ge. Inelastic scattering and particularly valence losses, electron channeling, optical potential and x-ray production, amorphous materials were all major contributions, as were the series of projects centered on novel STEM methods.