Winners of the IOF Scientific Image Competition 2025

We are very happy to announce the winners of this years competition. The interest in the competition was very high and we got a total of 440 votes (3 votes per person) in the course of yesterday’s open campus day.

You can find all the entries in this presentation:
https://iof-group.gitlabpages.ista.ac.at/teaching/2025-imagecompetition-analysis/assets/2025_image_competition_presentation.pdf
(Please do not re-post any images without explicit permission of the author!)

And as we like over-engineering stuff as much as the next person, Marco developed a sticker-segmentation analysis routine for obtaining the results of the voting, which you can look up in our repository here:
https://iof-group.gitlabpages.ista.ac.at/teaching/2025-imagecompetition-analysis/


Without further ado, the winners are:

1st Place: Equilibrium by Michaela Jovic

2nd Place: Neural Bloom by Eleonora Quiroli

3rd Place: Untangling the Brain by Jake Watson

and a Special Price goes to Reena Kumari, for sending in 5 (!) amazing images with very thoughtful and poetic descriptions.

The winners will be contacted individually in the coming days regarding their prices.

We would like to exhibit the physical gallery for a few more days in a public space (exact location to be determined) and would later distribute the cut out images to the respective authors. 

Thank you once again to all authors!

Cheers,
Your IOF Team