Olympus has announced the two winners of the Olympus Early Career Scientist Microscopy Award.
This award, launched at Microscience 2008, was set up to offer early career life scientists the opportunity to acquire the long-term loan of an Olympus microscopy system, worth over GBP150,000.
Due to the high quality of more than 50 entries, Olympus decided to award two prizes.
Alessandro Bianchi of the MRC in Sussex has gained unrestricted use of an Olympus Scan^R modular microscope-based imaging platform for two years.
This screening station, designed for fully-automated image acquisition and data analysis of biological samples, will be used for his work on the characterisation of end protection and repression of telomerase action at normal-length telomeres.
Wynand Van der Goes van Naters of Cardiff University School of Biosciences has been awarded with a BX51WI fixed-stage upright microscope that offers image clarity for electrophysiological experiments.
This will enhance the success of his research into sexual communication by smell in mosquitoes and flies.
The two successful applicants were presented with their award certificates at a celebration lunch held at the Royal Society of Medicine's Chandos House, London.
This lunch was attended by the academic judging panel - Dr Martin Bootman, Prof Viki Allan and Prof Geoff Pilkington, representatives from Olympus, as well as members of the press.
