Awards

The best photo of the FZU Photo Competition 2021 was taken by Denyse Musiienko, Ladislav Straka and Ross Colman using interference microscopy to capture a martensitic structure. In an absolute ranking of 126 submissions, second place was won by Alexej Bubonov, who also came second in 2020. The winners of this year’s contest have won third place too.

The Becquerel Prize is the confirmation of Lenka Kubíčková’s extraordinary achievements in science. The highest award given by the French Embassy in Prague in the category for Ph.D. students in the field of nuclear research was presented to a fresh Ph.D. by the Nobel Prize winner Jean-Maria Lehn and the French Ambassador Alexis Dutertre. The award ceremony, where twenty-three prizes in seven competition categories were awarded, took place at the Buquoy Palace at the end of September.

On September 28, the Neuron Endowment Fund awarded two leading scientists of the Institute of Physics. In the Pantheon of the National Museum, Václav Petříček received the highest prize awarded, Neuron Prize for Contribution to World Science, and Prokop Hapala was ranked by the Neuron Board among seven promising young scientists awarded.

At a ceremony on 22 September 2021, the president of the Czech Academy of Sciences Eva Zažímalová decorated five researchers from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences for their achievements in physics. Two others from the FZU received medals for their Merit for the Czech Academy of Sciences for their excellent contribution to the development of their expert area.

A research team of the Laboratory of Biophysics won the Cells 2021 Best Video Abstract Awards contest. The winning video abstract of the Biophysics team is a crisp illustration of the research paper, published in journal Cells. The Award Committee highly evaluated the research novelty, video quality and votes of the readers.

Libor Šmejkal from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences has won the second place in the “Best Dissertation Thesis” category in this year’s Werner von Siemens Award. Libor won the award for the thesis entitled “Topology band theory of relativistic spintronics in antiferromagnets” supervised by professor Tomáš Jungwirth.

The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research awarded the JINR Prize for 2020 to the team whose member is Dr. Nikita Medvedev, deputy head of the theory group in the Department of Radiation and Chemical Physics (Institute of Physics) and head of the theory group in the Laser Plasma Department (Institute of Plasma Physics).

Within European Researchers' Night an online art opening of the FZU Photo Competition 2020 was performed and winners were announced. Alexey Bubnov got the 2^nd place for his image of a beautiful liquid crystal texture resembling the Sun’s corona.