MicroscopyAwards
Microscopy Society of America Awards: 2021 Award Winners
Miaofang Chi Oak Ridge National Laboratory
chim@ornl.gov
Each year, the Microscopy Society of America (MSA)
provides several major awards for outstanding contributions to the fields of microscopy and microanalysis and service to the Society. While recipients of these awards are listed under the tab Awards & Scholarships – Society Awards | Microscopy Society of America on the MSA homepage, little information as to why awards were bestowed is provided. This article highlights the contributions of the winners of the 2021 MSA major Society awards and the MSA Fellows. The information presented here represents a short summary of information provided in the awardees’ nomination packages. Guidelines, including deadlines for nominating individuals for these and other MSA awards, can be found at
https://www.microscopy.org/awards/society.cfm.
Distinguished Scientist Awards Distinguished Scientist Awards annually recognize
a preeminent senior scientist, from both the biological and physical sciences, who has a long-standing record of achievement during his or her career in the field of microscopy or microanalysis.
Biological Sciences Distinguished Scientist: David Agard David Agard has an
David Agard, Professor of Biochem- istry & Biophysics and Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the Uni- versity of California, San Francisco.
outstanding track record in methods development in both electron and light microscopy. As early as the 1990s, David’s group pioneered automation methods for electron tomo- graphy that others later adapted for cryo-EM single- particle data collection. Tese methods are now universally used throughout the field, and they have contributed to the extraordinary renaissance that has brought single- particle cryo-EM into the mainstream as an essential structural biology technique. David’s group also pioneered
soſtware development for correcting beam-induced motion between frames of movies acquired using cryo-EM. Tese methods are used countless times each day in laboratories around the world.
10 doi:10.1017/S1551929521001383 David’s major technical developments in microscopy have
been critical to contributing to his fundamental interest in understanding the complex relationships between structure and function at both the molecular and cellular level. Having a solid background in structural biophysics, David’s research focuses on elucidating the mechanisms of assisted folding by the Hsp90 molecular chaperone system, microtubule nucleation, and phage nucleus assembly. He has a very wide range of research interests including understanding the mechanisms of assisted protein folding and microtubule assembly, the structural basis for ligand specificity, and the architecture and function of cellular machines. He has been exceptionally productive throughout his career, as is evident from more than 260 publications. His work has been recognized by his election to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2007 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.
Physical Sciences Distinguished Scientists: Maximilian Haider and Knut W. Urban
Left: Maximilian Haider, Group Leader, Physical Instrumentation Program, European Molecular Biology Laboratory. Right: Knut Urban, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Ernst Ruska-Center for Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Electrons.
Maximilian Haider is an Austrian physicist who was intro-
duced to electron optics by Otto Scherzer and Harald Rose in Kiel and Darmstadt, Germany, where they developed a mul- tipole-element for running the Cs-Cc aberration correction project. In 1987, as his PhD project on the “Design, construc- tion, and testing of a corrected electron energy loss spectrom- eter with large dispersion and a large acceptance angle,” he
www.microscopy-today.com • 2021 November
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