Mazène Hochane and Xueying Fan win LION Image Award 2018

19 December 2018

Mazène Hochane and Xueying Fan have won the fourth annual LION Image Award. They created a detailed colour image of a human kidney in development.

Postdoc Mazène Hochane and PhD student Xueying Fan receive the first prize at the next Ehrenfest Colloquium. Their winning picture deserves a place in the wall of fame on the 1st floor of the Oort building, next to the previous winners. Check out below the top 3 of the LION Image Award 2018.

Winner

Mazène Hochane and Xueying Fan (Click here for high resolution)

The kidney is an essential organ responsible for filtering blood while preserving water and ions. Development of the human kidney starts as early as the fifth week of pregnancy. In order to understand more about how the kidney develops, our labs study the composition of the fetal kidney at the microscopic scale. The image shows a micrograph of a human kidney in development. Several cell types were localized using fluorescence in different colors. Image credit: Chuva de Sousa Lopes lab (LUMC), Semrau lab (Leiden University). The research was supported by a Generade grant.

Runner-up

Johannes Jobst and Tobias de Jong

Carbon layers that are only one atom thin can be grown on silicon carbide by heating it to 1800°C. This so-called graphene layer gets strained by this treatment, however. The low-energy electron microscopy (LEEM) image shows that the graphene layer adapts to this tension by forming nanoscopic domains. All the strain is concentrated into the domain walls (dark lines) which allows the lion’s share of the area (yellow) to relax. Credit: Johannes Jobst and Tobias de Jong.

3rd place

Daan van Velzen

This is a two-dimensional simulation of the acoustic pressure in a microchannel of liquid. When a voltage is applied to a piezoelectric material, its shape will change periodically depending on the frequency of the applied voltage. If a layer of fluid is located directly next to this piezo-electric material, acoustic waves emerge in the fluid. For specific frequencies, called resonances, the waves in the fluid layer are standing waves. The image shows simulated data of the absolute acoustic pressure in a layer of fluid at such a frequency. The different colors represent different values of the acoustic pressure. Credit: Daan van Velzen.