Congratulations to the winners of the twelfth 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 eleven years, even if they did not win an Innovation 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 2021 Microscopy Today Innovation Award winners are:
Bruker Nano GmbH for the development of NanoRacer High-Speed AFM
Carl Zeiss Microscopy, LLC for the development of Lattice Lightsheet 7
Delmic B.V. for the development of METEOR to assist cryo-EM
DENSsolutions B.V. for the development of CLIMATE for in situ microscopy
Excelitas Technologies Corp. for the development of the X-Cite NOVEM fluorescence illumination system
EXpressLO LLC for the development of EXpressLO-ZTM FIB/TEM specimen grids
Gatan, Inc. for the development of the StelaTM Hybrid-Pixel Camera
Hummingbird Scientific for the development of Multi-model in situ bulk liquid-electrochemistry microscopy
Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. for the development of the Helios 5 Laser PFIB
WITec GmbH for the development of the alpha300 apyron automated Raman microscope
An article within this issue provides descriptions of the above innovations. Nomination applications for the next competition are available upon request (charles.lyman@lehigh.edu). The deadline for application submission is March 21, 2022.