Microscopy Society of America Awards: 2025 Award Winners

When Marc De Graef started his undergraduate studies as a freshman in Physics at the University of Antwerp, Belgium in 1979, the practical problem sessions for one of his courses, Crystallography, were held on the edge of campus, in a building that was oddly shaped as a cube on top of half a cube.The instructor for this course was Joseph Van Landuyt, and Gustaaf Van Tendeloo tended to the problem sessions.Two of his other professors were Severin Amelinckx (General Physics) and Rudolph Gevers (Analytical Mechanics).It did not take long for Marc to learn that this group was a powerhouse in transmission electron microscopy, both experimentally and in terms of theoretical understanding of two-beam defect images.In fact, at the end of his freshman year, Marc approached Amelinckx and asked if there was a way for him to learn how to operate a TEM; Amelinckx said "Sure!" and he arranged for Marc to spend the summer at the Nuclear Center in Mol, Belgium, where he was taught how to use the TEM (a now ancient Philips EM200, a wonderful instrument for electron diffraction) and where he taught himself the necessary quantum mechanics to understand the theory of image formation.Little did he know that this one request, to learn how to operate a TEM, would determine the rest of his career.He completed the equivalent of an MS degree in 1982 with a high-resolution TEM study on the structure of xMnS -yGa_2S_3 before moving on to the Gorlaeus Laboratory in Leiden, the Netherlands, where he started to work on a PhD in the area of oxides (in particular, mixtures of NiO and TiO 2 ).After a few months Marc learned that a doctoral position had opened up in the "Materiaalkunde" department (Materials Science) at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and he started there in March of 1983 with research on phase stability in copper-based martensitic shape-memory alloys, in particular Al-Cu-Zn and Al-Ni-Cu.Since he was going for a PhD in Physics, he needed a co-advisor in the Physics department, so his thesis advisors were Luc Delaey (MSE) and G.S.D. King (Physics).After a one-year interruption for mandatory military service, Marc completed his PhD in May of 1989.As another illustration of how circumstances can have long-term effects, it turns out that the kinetics of the Cu-Al system is extremely sluggish around 400C, with some heat treatments taking up to two years, so there was ample time for Marc to teach himself programming (Pascal) and computer operating systems (UNIX mostly); to this date, Marc still has a strong interest in modeling and simulations that can be traced back to his PhD days.After completing his doctoral degree, Marc's original plan was to join the University of Wollongong, Australia, as a post-doctoral researcher to continue his work on shape memory alloys.A few weeks before his scheduled departure, however, he received a telegram from