From left: Stéphane Crouzat (French Ambassador to the Czech Republic), Barbara Eignerová (Chairwoman of the IOCB Tech Foundation board), Helena Hrušková (CSCH Special Prize), Petr Macháč (3rd Prize), David Dunlop (2nd Prize), Karolína Salvadori (1st Prize), Prof. Tomáš Navrátil (President of ČSCH) and Prof. Jean-Marie Lehn. (Photo: © Ondřej Besperát)
Scientific Prizes and the Jean-Marie Lehn Prize for Chemistry
The Scientific Prizes of the French Embassy are open to PhD students enrolled in a doctoral program or postdoctoral fellows who have recently defended their PhD dissertations. The awards cover the fields of chemistry, medicine, pharmacy, computer, nuclear sciences, environment and climate, and social sciences and humanities.
The oldest of these awards is the Jean-Marie Lehn Prize for Chemistry, which since 1994, when it was established by the 1987 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Jean-Marie Lehn, has recognized outstanding research work by Czech students in the field of chemistry conducted during their doctoral studies. Our foundation has proudly sponsored this prize and the financial awards for the winners for the second time.
Chairwoman of the IOCB Tech Foundation board Barbara Eignerová (Photo: © Ondřej Besperát)
This year's winners are:
- 1st Prize (80,000 CZK): Karolína Salvadori from the Faculty of Chemical Technology, UCT Prague, awarded for her research “Study of building blocks suitable for preparation of functional receptor materials for sensorics”
- 2nd Prize (50,000 CZK): David Dunlop from the IOCB Prague, awarded for his research “Electronic and geometric degrees of freedom of organoelement compounds”
- 3rd Prize (30,000 CZK): Petr Macháč from the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, awarded for his research “Synthesis and characterization of catalysts”
1st Prize in the Jean-Marie Lehn Prize 2024 was awarded to Karolína Salvadori from UCT Prague. (Photo: © Ondřej Besperát)
In addition to the main prizes, the Special Prize of the Czech Chemical Society was awarded to Helena Hrušková from Masaryk University for her work "Micro- and mezzo-fluidic instrumentation for enrichment of biological samples".
The laureates were introduced by Prof. Jean-Marie Lehn and the awards were presented by the French Ambassador to the Czech Republic Stéphane Crouzat, the Chairwoman of the IOCB Tech Foundation board Barbara Eignerová and the President of the Czech Chemical Society Prof. Tomáš Navrátil.
Sounds of Science conference
Besides the Scientific Prizes, we also sponsored the third Sounds of Science conference, which featured top-level scientists and musicians in a dialogue between science and the arts.
This year, the event hosted three leading French scientists: Jean-Marie Lehn (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1987), Jules Hoffmann (Nobel Prize in Medicine, 2011), and Alain Aspect (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2022) who presented short talks about the latest scientific concepts in their fields.
Between lectures, musical performances were orchestrated by Michal Rataj, Jan Trojan, and Ivo Kahánek.
