The Henry Marion Howe award is presented annually by ASM International to the authors of the paper selected as the best of those published in Metallurgical and Materials Transactions for a particular year. Recently the 2005 winners were announced: David M. Saylor, Joseph Fridy, Anthony D. Rollet, Kee Young Jung and Bassem S. El-Dasher for their paper entitled "Statistically Representative Three-Dimensional; Microstructures Based on Orthogonal Observation Sections" published in the July 2004 issue of Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A (pp. 1969-1979). As detailed in the paper, this research makes use of OIMTM data to reconstruct model microstructures from orthogonal sections of an aluminum polycrystal. We congratulate the authors on their excellent work.

In the same issue of Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A, members of this same group of authors (David M. Saylor and Bassem S. El-Dasher) teamed up with Brent L. Adams and Gregory S. Rohrer to publish a paper on the statistical recovery of the full five-parameter description of grain boundaries (three angles describing crystallographic misorientation at the boundary and two for describing the orientation of the boundary plane) from planar OIM^TM scans. The ideas presented in this paper (pages 1981-1999) have been implemented in version 4.5 of OIM^TM .

A plot produced in OIM^TM showing the character of recrystallization twins in a copper thin film is shown at right. It is a grain boundary plane orientation plot for boundaries with misorientations of 60° about <111> in a copper thin film. The high intensity peak (signified by the red color) at (111) indicates that the majority of the specified boundaries have their boundary planes parallel to (111). This means the majority of the twins are coherent twins.

In 1994, EDAX-TSL scientist Stuart Wright co-authored a paper with Brent L. Adams and Karsten Kunze describing some of the initial development work behind the OIMTM technique. This paper was awarded the 1994 Howe award. The paper was entitled "Orientation Imaging: The Emergence of a New Microscopy" and was published in the 1993 April Issue (volume 24) of Metallurgical Transactions A on pages 819-831.