Bio-artist and scientist Thomas Deerinck wins the 2018 Lennart Nilsson Award. He gets the prize for developing novel microscopy techniques and methods to improve the ability to obtain information from biological specimens.
Thomas Deerinck is a research scientist, technical specialist and bio-artist at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Reseach (NCMIR) and the Center for Research on Biological Systems at the University of California, San Diego. Over the past four decades he has developed novel techniques and methods to improve our ability to obtain information from biological specimens using many types of microscopes. He has made many important contributions to the field of bioimaging, including key work on developing chemical, molecular and genetic tagging methods for studying cells and tissues by both light and electron microscopy.
Thomas Deerincks latest work is focused on improving serial block-face scanning electron microscopy; a method that is revolutionizing automated 3D imaging of cells and tissues at nanometer-scale resolution. He not only developed the now gold-standard protocol for preparing samples for this imaging technique, but also just recently co-developed a method to greatly extend the resolution and usefulness of this approach in the field of biomedical research.
Tom is married to the artist Karla Renshaw, who taught him to bring an artistic eye common to nature photography to scientific imaging with microscopes. The resulting images of even common everyday objects are turned from the invisible into beautiful works of art, and have appeared not only on the cover of numerous top tier scientific journals, but also in many non-scientific magazines, periodicals, documentaries as well as public art exhibitions.
Now Thomas Deerinck is awarded the 2018 Lennart Nilsson Award for his outstanding work.
