Congratulations to the winners of the eighth 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 or entirely new methods of analysis using some type of microscope or microanalytical instrument.

The 2017 Microscopy Today Innovation Award winners are:

Aalto University (Finland) for the black-silicon induced-junction silicon photodiode

Bruker-Hysitron for NanoScratch in-situ nanomechanical testing in the SEM

Keyence Corporation of America for the VR-3000 non-contact wide-area 3D measurement system

University of Missouri for the plasmonic grating platform to replace glass slides

University of Newcastle (Australia) for the scanning helium atom microscope

Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Uppsala (Sweden) for a STEM method to observe magnetic ordering with atomic resolution

Phasefocus for the Livecyte^® Kinetic Cytometer to analyze live cell populations

Scripps Institution of Oceanography for the benthic underwater microscope

University of Washington and Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology for scanning thermo-ionic microscopy

Yale University for multimodal imaging using a coherence switching laser

Descriptions of the above innovations are given in an article within this issue. Nomination applications for the next competition are available upon request ([email protected]). The deadline for the next competition is March 21, 2018.