Jinnai, Midgley, Spontak share Ernst Ruska Prize

The German Society for Electron Microscopy has named the winners of its 2007 Ernst Ruska Prize. They are Hiroshi Jinnai, associate professor of macromolecular science and engineering at Kyoto Institute of Technology in Japan; Paul A. Midgley, professor of materials science and director of the electron microscopy facility at the University of Cambridge; and Richard J. Spontak, Alumni Distinguished Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering at North Carolina State University.

The Ernst Ruska Prize is awarded for work carried out by younger scientists pioneering new capabilities of electron microscopy as a scientific technique through innovative instrumentation or novel methods of basic and general interest.

It is named after the late Ruska, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. Jinnai, Midgley, and Spontak are being recognized for their efforts to introduce electron tomography as an analytical method to study nanostructured materials. They received the award in September during a ceremony at the Microscopy Conference 2007 in Saarbrücken, Germany.