Biomedical Optics Express (BOEx) is the principal interdisciplinary outlet for serving the biomedical optics and biophotonics communities, publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed research related to optics, photonics, and optical imaging in biomedicine and biology. Since its launch in 2010, BOEx has attracted submissions from active scientists at all stages of their careers. Last year we established the BOEx Best Paper Prize [1] to recognize the best paper published during the previous three years, celebrating the excellent content in our journal. We are delighted to announce the new winner of our BOEx Best Paper Prize.

The prize recognizes the authors of a paper that a committee of BOEx editors judged to be outstanding. The selection committee was chaired by the Deputy Editor and consisted of associate editors, Drs. Brendan Kennedy, Linda Lundström, Shuichi Makita, Filiz Yesilkoy, and Guoan Zheng, who represent a range of topics across the scope of BOEx. They were responsible for identifying a winner from among all of the papers published between 2020 and 2022 based on criteria including the scientific significance, quality, and presentation of the results. The selection task was particularly difficult since the article had to be selected from 1,500 papers.

The winning article, “Robotic microscopy for everyone: the OpenFlexure microscope” was written by a team of UK and Tanzania scientists led by Richard Bowman from the University of Bath [2]. Joel T. Collins is the first author of this article. The paper presents an open-source, 3D-printed, and fully automated laboratory microscope with motorized sample positioning and focus control. Of interest is the careful design of this microscope for low-resource settings and the production of over 100 such microscopes in Tanzania and Kenya for educational, scientific, and clinical applications.

Considering the large number of high-quality papers published in BOEx in the past three years, the committee also recognized two outstanding papers for Honorable Mention. The first paper receiving the Honorable Mention, “Full-field spectral-domain optical interferometry for snapshot three-dimensional microscopy”, was written by a team of scientists led by Stephen A. Boppart from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [3]. Rishyashring R. Iyer is the first author of this article. The second paper, “Multicolor structured illumination microscopy and quantitative control of polychromatic light with a digital micromirror device,” which received the Honorable Mention, was written by a team of scientists led by Douglas P. Shepherd from Arizona State University [4]. Peter T. Brown is the first author of this article.

Please join us in congratulating these outstanding scientists on their selection as the winners and honorable mentions for the 2023 BOEx Best Paper Prize!