Award winners at the SLAS2026 conference have been announced, with the event attracting a record number of attendees. 

Steven Finkbeiner from Gladstone Institutes at the University of California San Francisco won the coveted Innovation Award for work on the ‘Development and Application of AI-powered Label-free Imaging for Assays and Screening’. 

There were three winners of the New Product Award, with Beckman Coulter Life Science’s eviDense UV photometer, BioDot’s NANOlab and Emulate’s AVA Emulation System all being recognised as the best new product on the market. 

Elsewhere, XDemics Corporation won the Ignite Award and Ginkgo Bioworks took home the People’s Choice Award. 

The conference also recognised the best student posters, with Christian Reinhardt from the University of Michigan, Renate Roeterink from University of Melbourne and Yining (Irene) Wang from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences/National Institutes of Health announced as Student Poster Winners. 

Attendance figures show SLAS2026 attracted a record number of attendees, with 7582 registrants across 47 countries attending the three-day event in Boston, US.