During the APS award ceremony, Miao received the 2026 APS Keithley Award from APS President Brad Marston.
The American Physical Society has awarded the 2026 Joseph F. Keithley Award For Advances in Measurement Science to Jianwei (John) Miao, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles. The award recognizes physicists who have made major advances in measurement techniques or equipment. APS cited Miao for pioneering coherent diffractive imaging and atomic electron tomography with X-rays and electrons, and for advancing quantitative 3D and 4D measurement techniques for crystal defects and amorphous materials from the nanoscale to the atomic scale.
For more than 25 years, Miao has pioneered new ways of seeing matter. In conventional microscopy, lenses form the image. In coherent diffractive imaging, or CDI, structure is reconstructed from diffraction patterns using computation. In his 2025 Nature review, Miao described CDI and ptychography as part of a broader form of computational microscopy that now spans an enormous range of length scales, from atomic structures in materials to phase imaging of centimeter-sized tissues.
That foundation also shaped modern ptychography. As the review explains, the 1999 CDI experiment by Miao and collaborators helped spark the later development of modern ptychography. The review also notes that modern ptychography initially combined scanning transmission X-ray microscopy with CDI. Today, CDI and ptychography are widely used in X-ray imaging, electron microscopy, and optical microscopy, and they have become powerful tools for studying materials, nanoelectronics, energy systems, and biological specimens.
The significance of the Keithley Award is that it honors more than a technical advance. It recognizes a body of work that has reshaped measurement science by expanding what can be measured and made visible, opening new ways to reconstruct matter in 3D and 4D, from crystal defects to amorphous materials that had long resisted direct determination.
