2010 Award

The Vice-President's Fund supports worthy projects using microscopy to contribute to the public understanding of science or benefit the developing world.

The 2010 prize was awarded to Stewart Church (left) and Professor Peter Hamilton (below) from Queens University Belfast for their project entitled CancerScapes: the complexity and richness of cancer microscopy.

The project aims to establish a unique CancerScape web portal, to illustrate the visual complexity of cancer tissues and cells, using high resolution web-microscopy. Images will be selected, annotated and described by experienced diagnostic pathologists in lay-mans terms. In addition, images will be described through poetry or prose provided by local English A Level students from schools in Northern Ireland.

A dedicated website will be developed to professionally present this material and PathXL will be used to manage and deliver high quality microscopy images to the general public using virtual microscopy. This project will provide a unique insight into the beauty of microscopy images but also their importance for cancer diagnostics, and in so doing blur the lines between art and science.