Werner Meyer-Ilse Memorial Award

The Werner Meyer-Ilse Memorial Award is given to young scientists for exceptional contributions to the advancement of X-ray microscopy through either outstanding technical developments or applications, as evidenced by their presentation at the International Conference on X-ray Microscopy and by supporting publications. 

Nominees must meet the following qualifications:

• Have performed the work as part of a completed Ph.D. thesis within the two-year period prior to and including the conference or are expected to receive their Ph.D. degree in the very near future. 
• The work should align with the conference themes. 
• The work must be available to the award committee as conference papers, publications, or preprints, 
• Nominees are required to submit an abstract request for an oral presentation of their work at the conference. 
• Nominees are required to attend the conference in person. 

The call for abstracts deadline for this conference is also the deadline for WMI award nominations. 

Nominators should supply the following information:

• Nominee’s name, affiliation, CV, and contact information,  
• Provide a short description (max. one page) of the work performed by the nominee and an explanation of the importance of the work.  
• Use the WMI award nomination form and include copies of relevant publications or preprints.  
• Supporting letters of recommendation are strongly encouraged.  
• Joint nominations (nominating more than one person for the same work) are not allowed. 

WMI nominations need to pass the same regular scientific merit review as other oral presentation requests. Nominations selected for poster presentation will not be considered for the WMI award. All WMI nominees and nominators will be informed about the results as soon as practically possible. Accepted nominees will receive a travel support of US$500 to aid participation in the conference. Nominees have to be present at the conference and will compete in person for the WMI award. 

The Werner Meyer-Ilse award consists of a medallion, citation and a US$3,000 cash prize. It is presented at the end of the XRM2026 Conference. For nomination submission or questions, please contact the award committee chair,  Juergen Thieme. All committee members can be found under.

Werner Meyer-Ilse was chair of the International Program Committee for XRM’99 and leader of the X-ray microscopy program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Werner died in a tragic automobile accident a few days before the 1999 conference. To honor his work and legacy the Werner Meyer-Ilse award was established and awarded for the first time at the XRM’99 at Berkeley, USA.

Year	Recipient	Recipient
2024	Takenori Shimamura (Tokyo University) For his work on ultracompact KB mirror systems to form a 20 nm achromatic soft X-ray focus	Yuhe Zhang (Lund University) For her work on physics-inspired deep learning approaches for 2D, 3D, and 4D X-ray imaging
2022	Jisoo Kim (SLS, ETH and Univ. Zürich) For his work on time-resolved scattering tensor tomography.	Yanqi Luo (APS and Univ. Calif. San Diego) For her work on X-ray studies of perovskite solar cells.
2020	Jumpei Yamada (RIKEN SPring-8 and Osaka Univ.) For his work on KB mirror optics for hard X-ray microscopy.
2018	Claire Donnelly (ETH Zürich and PSI) For her work on hard X-ray magnetic tomography as a new technique for the visualization of 3D magnetic structures.	Marie-Christine Zdora (Univ. College London) For developments on advanced X-ray phase-contrast and dark-field imaging with the unified modulated pattern analysis.
2016	Matias Kagias (ETH Zürich and PSI) For the development of novel micro-fabrication techniques for grating interferometry and a novel, Hilbert-based fringe-analysis framework to efficiently extract high-resolution quantitative information from differential phase contrast data.	Junjing Deng (Northwestern Univ. and Argonne NL) For his work on X-ray ptychography and fluorescence microscopy of cryogenic biological samples.
2014	Kevin Mader (ETH Zürich) For development of automated, high-throughput, quantitative x-ray tomography enabling large-scale studies of hundreds of samples with high statistics.
2012	Irene Zanette (Universite Joseph Fourier) For development of a highly sensitive x-ray grating interferometer imaging system and development of novel image acquisition and processing schemes for dose reduction and image quality improvement.	Stephan Werner (Humboldt Univ. Berlin) For the pioneering developments and realization of high efficiency, high-resolution on-chip stacking zone plates.
2010	Christian Holzner (Stony Brook Univ.) For developments across many fields of x-ray microscopy, including detector development (segmented and pixel array detectors), phase contrast imaging (differential and scanning Zernike), full-field tomography methods (Zernike filtering), and scanning x-ray fluorescence tomography.
2008	Pierre Thibault (PSI) For pioneering new work in coherent diffraction imaging and ptychography	Anne Sakdinawat (LBNL) For the development of modified zone plates for phase contrast and high depth of focus applications.
2005	Weilun Chao (Center for X-Ray Optics, Berkeley) For the fabrication of Fresnel zone plates with 15nm finest zone width and for demonstrating their focusing properties.
2002	Michael Feser (Stony Brook Univ.) For his development of a segmented solid state detector and Fourier filter imaging for the scanning transmission x-ray microscope.
1999	Jianwei Miao (Stony Brook Univ.) For his contributions to the development of x-ray image formation based on the recording and reconstruction of the diffraction pattern from a non-crystalline object.	Daniel Weiss (Inst. X-Ray Physics, Göttingen) For his contributions to the development of x-ray tomographic imaging of cryogenically prepared biological specimens.