Ten Czech scientists, in two main categories, received Neuron Awards on Tuesday, September 28, at a gala ceremony at Prague’s National Museum. Three received the award for their lifelong contribution to science, while seven awards went to young scientists doing basic or applied research. Eight recipients have ties with, or work at, Charles University.
The University of Utah's Josef Prchal, one of the recipients of a Neuron Award recognising his contribution to science, in his case medicine.
September 28th is Czech Statehood Day, also marking the legacy of King Wenceslas. Tuesday, the public holiday also saw the holding of Neuron 2021, honouring excellence and ground-breaking contributions in science research. This year, Charles University counted four alumni and three researchers among the recipients. Charles University alumnus and doyen in medicine Josef Prchal received a Neuron Award for his life’s work. Prchal is based at the Division of Hematology and Hematologic Malignancies, at the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The Prchal Lab has long studied the molecular basis of hematological diseases.
Another CU alumnus recognised for his contribution to the world of science is mathematician David Preiss, based the University of Warwick. Preiss, a Fellow of the Royal Society in Great Britain and a Foreign Fellow of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic, and an internationally-recognised expert on geometric measure theory. The last CU scientist to receive a Neuron for lifelong contribution is Václav Petříček, a CU alumnus who has worked for most of his professional career at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is recognised for writing the first JANA programme and the “Crystallographic approach” to magnetic structures.
Young Charles University researchers recognised on Tuesday include the following:
Martin Tancer, from CU’s Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. Tancer’s research is in the area of geometric and topological combinatorics, computational topology, and graph theory.
Physicist Lenka Zdeborová who has a Ph. D. from Charles University and the University Paris-Sud and is a professor of Physics and of Computer Science in École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where she leads the Statistical Physics of Computation Laboratory. Zdeborová’s expertise is in applications of concepts from statistical physics, such as advanced mean field methods, replica method and related message-passing algorithms, applied to problems in machine learning, signal processing, inference and optimization.
Jitka Palich Fučíková (pictured) of the Department of Immunology at the Second Faculty of Medicine and Motol University Hospital also received a Neuron. Palich Fučíková is well-known for her research into the role of the immune system in fighting cancer and testing immunotherapeutic vaccines against prostate, lung and ovarian cancer. You can read about her in the archive of Forum from 2018, pg. 26, Stimulating the Immune System to FIght Cancer.
Evolutionary biologist Zuzana Musilová, based at the Faculty of Science, was likewise recognised for her outstanding research on the evolution of sensory systems in fish.
You can read about all of the recipients (including an additional special category Business and Science Award given jointly to three researchers, bringing the overall tally of persons awarded on the night to 13) here or at https://www.nfneuron.cz/en.
If you follow Czech, you can watch the full gala ceremony, hosted by youtuber and internet personality Kovy at the National Museum here.
The Neuron Endowment Fund for the support of science – which organises the Neuron Awards – was founded in 2010. Laureates receive 1.5 million crowns together with Neuron Awards for lifelong contribution, while young researchers awarded receive 500,000 Czech crowns in funds.
