Ondrej Krivanek
Ondrej Krivanek has advanced electron microscopy (EM) by developing instruments such as electron energy loss spectrometers, imaging filters, aberration correctors, monochromators, and whole electron microscopes, which have endowed EM with extraordinary new capabilities. He and his collaborators have introduced new experimental techniques such as imaging and spectroscopy of light atoms using annular dark field STEM, EELS and EDXS, and vibrational spectroscopy carried out in the electron microscope. Research made possible by these advances includes imaging and analyzing the bonding properties of single light atoms, and analyzing the vibrational properties of materials with spatial resolution reaching the single-atom level.
Ondrej is also known for co-founding and leading Nion Company, a maker of advanced electron microscope, acquired by Bruker Corporation in 2024. He is currently Senior Scientific Advisor in the Electron Microscopy Unit of Bruker AXS, Affiliate Professor at Arizona State University, and Fellow at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge UK. His work has been honored by several prizes, fellowships and honorary doctorates, including an election to the UK Royal Society and the US Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and the 2020 Kavli Prize for Nanoscience.
Max Haider
Max. Haider received his PhD in Physics from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, in 1987. He specialized in electron optics and instrumentation. Already during his diploma work in Darmstadt he was involved in the development of correctors, which attracted his attention over his whole career. He became a group leader at the EMBL, Heidelberg in 1990 where he started two projects of aberration correctors: a Cc/Cs-corrector for a low voltage SEM and together with H. Rose and K Urban the Cs-corrector project for TEM in 1991. Both projects could be finished successfully with an improvement of the attainable resolution in 1995 and 1997, respectively. In 1996, he founded together with J. Zach the company CEOS which concentrates on the development of correctors and other advanced electron optical components. Until the end of 2018, about 800 correctors have been installed worldwide with the corrector technology of CEOS and this figure was even almost doubled (1587) at the end of 2025.
He received several awards, like the Beckurts Award in 2006, the Honda Prize in 2007, the Wolf Prize in 2011 and the BBVA Award in 2014. Since 2008, he has been appointed as an Honorary Professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. In 2015, he received the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Microscopy Society and the NIMS Award have been awarded to him. In 2019, he was nominated for the European Inventor Award for his life-time achievements. In the same year, he has been selected as a member of the Class 2019 Fellows of the Microscopy Society of America. And, also in 2019, he became an Honorary Member of the German Society of Electron Microscopy. In 2020, he was elected together with H. Rose, K. Urban and O. Krivanek to become a winner of the Kavli-Award. Due to the SARS-CoV pandemic, the Award Ceremony in Oslo had to be postponed til September 2022. And, finally, in 2021 he was awarded as a Distinguished Scientist in Physical Sciences.