Achieving widespread global appeal and industry financial backing, Hack the Microscope 2025 brought together researchers, students, and professionals to solve real microscopy problems using AI and data-driven tools.
The second annual event, organized by the University of Tennessee’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, took place December 16-18, 2025, at 20 sites worldwide. It had 700 registrants and 250 active participants, engaging either in person or virtually.
This year’s hackathon was held at multiple locations in the United States, Europe, Singapore, Korea, Qatar, and India.
Among the US colleges that took part were UT, Northwestern University, North Carolina State University, Colorado School of Mines, Johns Hopkins University, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Wisconsin, and University of Colorado.
A total of $25,000 in prize money from major instrument manufacturers, IT companies, startups, and philanthropists was distributed.
“The community is converging on ML-enabled automated microscopy, and UT is positioned as a convening hub in this space,” said MSE Weston Fulton Professor Sergei Kalinin, the co-organizer of the event alongside MSE Professor Gerd Duscher. “The Hackathon contributes to our standing in this world and this year’s event once again showed the ability of UT to be a leader in this space, building upon the unique ecosystem of automated electron and scanning probe microscopes built at UT.”
Hack the Microscope 2025 received 70 submitted projects, with many of them closer to working prototypes than just general ideas. Participants worked in small interdisciplinary teams to explore imaging, spectroscopy, and automation challenges.
MSE graduate students Austin Houston, Aditya Raghavan, and Utkarsh Pratiush assisted Kalinin and Duscher in organizing the event.
Microscopy is a primary source of information on materials structure and functionality at nanometer and atomic scales. Adoption of Data Management Plans by major funding agencies promotes the preservation and access to the data generated by microscopy. Deriving insights and downstream applications remains difficult, however, due to the lack of standardized code ecosystems, benchmarks, and integration strategies. The hackathon is designed to target this weakness.
“We plan to make this an annual event and potentially expand the format as the community grows,” said Duscher, an early pioneer in automated microscopy. “This event is just another way that UT is helping move microscopy from isolated ‘AI demos’ to deployable, community-scale infrastructure for ML-enabled and increasingly automated workflows.”
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Rhiannon Potkey ([email protected])