Synthetic Neurobiology head Ed Boyden has received the 2019 Lennart Nilsson Award, an international award bestowed annually upon an individual in recognition of outstanding contributions within the realm of scientific photography, for his work with expansion microscopy.

Granted by the Lennart Nilsson Award Foundation, this recognition honors the legacy of Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson, best known for his groundbreaking 1965 book, A Child is Born. The Foundation writes, "Ed Boyden has with expansion microscopy, much like Lennart Nilsson, made the invisible visible and, with an artistic view, highlighted the beauty in microscopy preparations, in particular images of the brain's three-dimensional structure. His microscope images have, through their detail and beauty, provided a deeper understanding of the complexity of the brain for both laymen and experts.

Image above: a rendering of part of a large scale, 3-D, multicolor image of a piece of the mouse hippocampus. Neurons express differently colored fluorescent proteins through a technology called Brainbow, in which viruses deliver the genes that encode for different fluorescent proteins to different neurons. This brain was prepared using expansion microscopy.