Berkeley Lab Technology Wins R&D 100 Award
Berkeley Lab’s Time of Flight Cascade Gamma Ray Imaging technology received a 2026 R&D 100 Award for advancing nuclear medicine imaging and enabling precise alpha-targeted cancer therapies.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) announced that its Time of Flight Cascade Gamma Ray Imaging (TOF-CGI) technology has been selected as a 2026 R&D 100 Award winner. The award recognizes the year’s top 100 innovative technologies across industry, academia, and government research. TOF-CGI enhances nuclear medicine scanners by capturing high-sensitivity images of low-concentration radionuclide emissions, improving diagnostic precision and supporting advanced therapies such as alpha-targeted cancer treatments.
The R&D 100 Awards ceremony will take place on November 19 in Phoenix, Arizona, where Berkeley Lab’s TOF-CGI and the Pele combustion simulation suite, co-developed with other national labs, will be honored. Pele, an open-source tool for modeling fuel combustion in engines and turbines, uses exascale supercomputing and AI to simulate complex fuel-air interactions, enabling the design of more efficient and durable aerospace and power technologies.
Berkeley Lab’s development team for TOF-CGI is led by Javier Caravaca Rodriguez, while the Pele team includes Marcus Day (National Lab of the Rockies), Ann Almgren, John Bell, Andrew Myers, Andrew Nonaka, and Weiqun Zhang from Berkeley Lab. The lab also had a third finalist, the Reconductoring Economic and Financial Analysis Tool (REFA), which evaluates the financial and environmental benefits of power line upgrades.
Berkeley Lab, managed by the University of California for the DOE’s Office of Science, conducts research in energy, materials, and computing. The lab has earned 17 Nobel Prizes and supports scientific facilities used by researchers worldwide. For licensing inquiries, contact [email protected].