Category: Awards
IUPAC announces the 2001 winners of the IUPAC Prize for Young Chemists
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) today announced the winners of the IUPAC Prize for Young Chemists, planned as an award for the best Ph.D. thesis in the chemical sciences, as described in a 1000-word essay.
The winners are:
- Soumyakanti Adhikari, University of Mumbai, Mumbai, India;
- Michelle Louise Coote, University New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;
- Stephan Link, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;
- Teri Wang Odom, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; and
- Paolo Samorí, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany.
The five winners will each receive a cash prize of USD 1000 and a free trip to the IUPAC Congress, 1-6 July 2001, Brisbane, Australia. Each prize winner will also present a poster at the IUPAC Congress describing his/her award winning work. Applications for the 2002 Prize are now being solicited, as described on the IUPAC web site www.iupac.org.
The essays describing the winners' theses can be found on the IUPAC web site and cover a wide range of subject matter:
- Dr. Odom, "Electronic Properties of single-walled carbon nanotubes;" and
There were 29 applicants from 15 countries. The Prize Selection Committee was comprised of Members of the IUPAC Bureau with a wide range of expertise in chemistry. The Committee was chaired by Dr. Joshua Jortner, Professor of Chemistry at Tel Aviv University and Past President of IUPAC. Prof. Jortner commented on the high quality of the applications and said, "I was very happy with the nominations for the 2001 Prize, which reflect on the high quality of the international activity, and on the development of new and exciting research areas in the chemical sciences. In choosing the Prize winners, we considered scientific standards and quality as primary criteria, and geographical diversification as a secondary criterion."
In view of the quality of many applications, the Committee decided also to give four Honorable Mention awards to:
- Volker P.W. Boehm, Technische Universität München, Germany;
- Erwin Kessels, Eindhoven Univ. of Technology, Netherlands;
- Angelos Michaelides, The Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland;
- Janne Ruokolainen, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.
The Honorable Mention Award winners will receive a cash prize of USD 100 and a copy of the Compendium of Chemical Terminology, the IUPAC "Gold Book". The awards to the four winners of the IUPAC 2000 Prize and the five winners of the IUPAC 2001 Prize will be made during the Grand Opening session of the IUPAC Congress in Brisbane, Australia.