Best Scientific Image Contest 2025: Celebrating the Winners

Helmholtz Imaging is thrilled to announce the winners of the Best Scientific Image Contest 2025. Now in its fifth year, the contest once again highlights the quality, creativity, and scientific value of image-based research across the Helmholtz Association. These images not only showcase the Association’s outstanding portfolio and expertise in imaging but also highlight their important role in contributing to solving major societal challenges.

With 104 outstanding submissions spanning from microscopic biology to planetary exploration, the contest once more underlines the power of imaging to spark scientific curiosity and tell compelling stories of discovery. We thank all participants for their enthusiasm, effort, and fascinating entries.

Award Categories and Winners

As every year, prizes were awarded in three categories:

• Jury Award – selected by an independent international panel of experts from the science communities as well as the arts
• Public Choice Award – decided by the imaging community and wider public
• Participants’ Choice Award – voted on by attendees of the Helmholtz Imaging Conference 2025

This year’s prizes were generously donated by Siemens Healthineers and Dectris, totaling €4,500.

Jury Award Winners

Announced by Prof. Dr. Otmar D. Wiestler, President of the Helmholtz Association, the top three images chosen by the jury are:

The Jury Award winners are:

1st Place
Excitation by Jana Kroll (MDC)

The image captures neurons during neurotransmitter release using a fluorescent glutamate sensor under cryogenic conditions. Variations in fluorescence intensity reveal the strength of neuronal activity, providing insight into how neurons signal and connect.

Prize: €1,000 donated by Siemens Healthineers

2nd Place
A Bark Beetle’s Stellar Gut by Jenny Hein & Thomas van de Kamp (KIT)

A 3D synchrotron scan revealing the star-shaped foregut of a bark beetle – a stunning look into insect inner morphology.

Prize: €700 donated by Siemens Healthineers

3rd Place
“Inca City” on Mars by Daniela Tirsch (DLR) & Björn Schreiner (Freie Universität Berlin)

A stunning view of Angustus Labyrinthus, a maze-like ridge system near Mars’ south pole, often called the “Inca City”. Captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express, this image offers new insight into the mysterious polar geology of the Red Planet.

Prize: €500 sponsored by Dectris

Public & Participants’ Choice Award Winners

Dagmar Kainmüller, spokesperson of Helmholtz Imaging, announced the winners of the Public Choice Award and Participants’ Choice Award of the Best Scientific Image Contest 2025:

Public Choice Award Winners

1st Place
Starfish Puts Motion Back in the Ocean by Rafael Deliz-Aguirre (MDC)

This image shows starfish embryos generating tiny currents that push them together to form crystal-like arrangements. Their microscopic tentacles create currents that mirror Earth’s magnetic shield visually and mathematically, and led to equations that might also apply to black hole plasmas and herds.

Prize: €600 donated by Siemens Healthineers

2nd Place
Rare Earth Element Fern by Kathryn Spiers, Dennis Brückner(DESY), Antony van der Ent (Wageningen University), Léo Goudard (Université de Lorraine) & Germinal Rouhan (Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris)

This image shows where the rare earth element yttrium is concentrated in the frond (leaf) of a fern.

Prize: Prize: €300 donated by Siemens Healthineers

3rd Place
A Bark Beetle’s Stellar Gut by Jenny Hein & Thomas van de Kamp (KIT)

A 3D synchrotron scan revealing the star-shaped foregut of a bark beetle – a stunning look into insect inner morphology.

Prize: €200 by Siemens Healthineers

Participants’ Choice Award Winners

The winners of the Participants’ Choice Award of the Best Scientific Image Contest 2025 are:

1st Place (shared)
Digital Forest / Digital Twin by by Aldino Rizaldy, Sam Thiele & Sharad Kumar Gupta (HZDR)

This image answers the question: How much does a forest weigh? Using drone-based light-detection and ranging point cloud dataset from a forest and advanced machine learning, the team created a digital twin of a forest to estimate its biomass, an increasingly important challenge in climate research.

Prize: €500 donated by Siemens Healthineers

1st Place (shared)
A Bark Beetle’s Stellar Gut by Jenny Hein & Thomas van de Kamp (KIT)

A 3D synchrotron scan revealing the star-shaped foregut of a bark beetle – a stunning look into insect inner morphology.

Prize: €500 donated by Siemens Healthineers

3rd Place
Filming the Smelling Brain by Athanasios Balomenos, Wenhan Luo & Gary Lewin (MDC)

This image is a merged view from functional ultrasound imaging and high-resolution microscopy. It illustrates stimulus-evoked neural activity in the smell center of anesthetized mice.

Prize: €200 donated by Siemens Healthineers

Congratulations to all the 2025 contest winners and thanks to everyone who participated this year.

Visit our gallery to see the top 21 images of 2025!

Exhibition and Outreach

The top 20 images selected by the jury will be featured in a traveling exhibition across Germany, showcasing the exciting work by Helmholtz researchers (and partners) in the different Helmholtz Centers to increase the visibility of Helmholtz’ research and its fascinating research outcomes.
If you are interested in hosting the exhibition, feel free to reach out to us: Katharina.Kriegel@helmholtz-imaging.de.

Photos: Jörg Modrow

About Helmholtz Imaging

Helmholtz Imaging‘s mission is to catalyze scientific discovery from sensory measurements to knowledge. Image data provide a substantial part of data being generated in scientific research. Helmholtz Imaging is the overarching platform to better leverage and make accessible to everyone the innovative modalities, methodological richness, and data treasures of the Helmholtz Association.

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We thank our donors Siemens Healthineers and Dectris for their generous support in providing prizes for our image contest.