We are thrilled to announce the winners of our 5th annual Image of the Year contest, recognizing the world’s best in scientific microscopic imaging. This year’s contest included our first-ever video category. This year’s winners were selected from entries from 29 countries. We thank everyone who entered, and we look forward to your participation again next year. |
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 | The Global WinnerBeauty of Cosmic ProportionsCross-section of a Cosmic Orange aster flower with pollen grains maturing inside anthers. Captured by Igor Siwanowicz of the United States. |
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Materials Science WinnerConnecting All Living ThingsHuman hair (vertical) knotted onto horsehair (horizontal). Captured by Gerd Günther of Germany. |  |
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Video WinnerA Vast & Boundless UniverseAmino acid crystallization process. Captured by Zhigang Zheng of China. |
Regional Award Winners
Americas The Revelation of New Perspective Tissue-cleared ladybug. Captured by Marko Pende (USA). | Europe, the Middle East, and Africa Nature as the Ultimate Artist Heart cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells. Captured by Till Stephan (Germany). | Asia-Pacific Nature’s Glass Gems Diatom arrangement. Captured by Daniel Han (Australia). |
Honorable Mentions
 Green crab, labeled with DAPI and imaged autofluorescence, reflected light. |  A cuckoo wasp. Cuckoo wasps are captivating insects, showcasing a dazzling array of iridescent colors. |  Juvenile sea star skeleton. Sea star (Patiria miniata) juvenile stained with calcein and DAPI. |
 Butterfly image consists of more than 200 scale patterns taken from different butterfly wings. |  Trap of subaquatic carnivorous bladderwort Utricularia humboldtii with trapped water mite Hydrachnidia. |  Collage of different fish parasites observed in dark field in Argentine Patagonia. |
 A warty leaf beetle (Poropleura) that looks like a prehistoric tyrannosaurus. |  Fluorescent images of normal rod-shaped filamentous cells of the common soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis and a spherical cell representative that has lost its cell wall. |  Crystalline pattern, like the big cotton padded jacket pattern handed down during the Chinese Spring Festival. |
 Tanaidacea crustacean swims in the water column during night and is attracted by light. Chitin emit light when excited using UV light. |  A look into the depths. Cross sections through the apical stem segments of the aquatic species Utricularia macrorhiza. |  The submarine. The image is a depict of a zebrafish head covered by epithelial cells expressing the palm-mTurquoise fluorescent protein and mCherry nuclear protein. |
Jurors
 | Geoff Williams, Manager of the Leduc Bioimaging Facility at Brown UniversityGeoff Williams is in his 14th year as manager of the Leduc Bioimaging Facility at Brown University. The opportunity to combine visual arts, science, technology, and mastery of a skill clicked with his discovery of microscopy (electron and light) as an undergraduate at Connecticut College. Geoff transitioned from a graduate program at Michigan State University to running the imaging facility at Central Michigan University before arriving at Brown. Over the past 20-plus years, he has been honing his craft as both an electron and light microscopist, paying more attention to the aesthetics of each image collected than is typically required of a purely scientific investigation. Geoff’s work, under the name Nanoscape, provides a tactile and striking view of samples we may or may not encounter in our day-to-day lives. |
 | Harini Sreenivasappa, Manager of the Cell Imaging Center at Drexel UniversityHarini Sreenivasappa is the manager of Drexel University’s light microscopy core facility, the Cell Imaging Center. She was introduced to microscopy during graduate school at Texas A&M University (TAMU), where she studied the role of microenvironment stimuli on cellular sensing and adapting as it takes place in blood vessel wall remodeling in cardiovascular disease. This led to a PhD in biomedical engineering. She has more than 10 years’ experience working with various microscopy techniques, such as atomic force microscopy (AFM), spinning disk confocal, and total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy. With ASCB’s COMPASS Outreach grant, she created and curated a Traveling Micrographs exhibit showcasing micrographs by TAMU researchers that was free and open to the public. The goal of the series of exhibits was to share research at TAMU with the local community and stimulate interest in imaging science. |
Past Winners
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The global winning image was taken by Laurent Formery (USA). Nervous system of a juvenile sea star (Patiria miniata) about 1 cm wide. Labeled with an antibody against acetylated tubulin after optical clearing, and captured using a color-coded Z-projection. |
