Congratulations to Professor Eszter Boros, who has been named the 2026 recipient of the Roger Tsien Award from the World Molecular Imaging Society, presented at the World Molecular Imaging Congress (WMIC) 2026. The award recognizes an early-stage investigator at the assistant or associate professor level who has made significant contributions to molecular imaging in the area of chemical biology, with particular emphasis on the creation and use of novel chemistries to probe biological systems through noninvasive imaging.
The honor recognizes Boros’s work pioneering new approaches that harness the unique properties of metal ions to develop molecular probes, radiopharmaceuticals, and therapeutics for applications including infection imaging, cancer diagnosis, and targeted treatment. Her interdisciplinary research spans multimodal imaging, radiometal and fluorine-18 chemistry, and prodrug activation — work that continues to push inorganic chemistry further into the interface of chemistry, biology, and medicine.
Boros joined the UW–Madison Department of Chemistry in 2023, bringing her research group from Stony Brook University, where she began her independent academic career in 2017. She holds the Hall-Fisher Professorship of Chemistry, with an affiliate faculty appointment in the Department of Medical Physics in the School of Medicine and Public Health. Her lab, which she describes as working in “medicinal inorganic chemistry,” develops radioactive and stable transition metal, metalloid, and lanthanide complexes for applications spanning biological imaging, drug discovery, and nuclear medicine, with work that has helped advance understanding of cancer, bacterial infection, and lung disorders in humans.
Boros earned her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in inorganic chemistry from the University of Zurich and her Ph.D. in radioimaging and inorganic chemistry from the University of British Columbia, followed by postdoctoral work at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research has previously been recognized with a 2022 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2021 Stony Brook Discovery Prize, and a 2020 Moore Inventor Fellowship from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
The Department of Chemistry congratulates Professor Boros on this national recognition of her creative contributions to chemical biology and molecular imaging.