Congratulations to the winners of the fifth annual Microscopy Today Innovation Awards competition. These awards honor innovative microscopy-related products and methods that appeared in the previous year.
Our team of judges, led by Tom Kelly, looked for innovations that will make new scientific investigations possible. The ten winning innovations were selected on the basis of their importance and usefulness to the microscopy community. The entries most likely to win are those that provide better, faster, or entirely new methods of analysis using some type of microscope or microanalytical instrument.
The 2014 Microscopy Today Innovation Award winners are:
AppFive LLC and NanoMegas SPRL for Topspin Strain Mapping software
Applied Nanostructures, Inc. for the VertiSense™ Scanning Thermal Microscopy module
Asylum Research for blueDrive™ Photothermal Excitation in Tapping Mode atomic force microscopy
CoolLED, Ltd. for the pE-4000 Universal LED Fluorescence Illumination System
FEI for the ExSolve™ and Metrios™ systems enabling an automated metrology workflow
Leica Microsystems CMS GmbH for Super-Resolution 3D Localization Microscopy
Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and Abberior Instruments GmbH for Ultraparallel RESOLFT Superresolution Microscopy
Manu Prakash of Stanford University for Foldscope, an origami-based print-and-fold microscope
Gavin King and Krishna Sigdel of the University of Missouri–Columbia for Direct 3D Atomic Force Microscopy
Hui Cao and Brandon Redding of Yale University for the Chip-scale Random Spectrometer
Descriptions of the above innovations are given in an article within this issue. This article also lists the developers of these instruments and methods.
Details of the nomination process for the next competition will be posted on the Microscopy Today website (www.microscopy-today.com) by January 1, 2015. Nomination applications will be accepted through March 15, 2015.
