News

Press room

Giovanni Ortolani
Public Information Officer
Via Beirut, 6
Enrico Fermi Building, Room 112
Office: +39 040 2240-324
gortolani@twas.org

Cristina Serra
Staff writer
Via Beirut, 6
Enrico Fermi Building, Room 113
Phone: +39 040 2240-429
Mobile: +39 338 430-5210
cserra@twas.org

Sean Treacy
Staff Writer
Via Beirut, 6
Enrico Fermi Building, Room T8/2
Office: +39 040 2240-538
streacy@twas.org

General contact: info@twas.org

TWAS Newsletter
The Academy's quarterly magazine.

TWAS Announces 2008 Prize Winners

TWAS Announces 2008 Prize Winners

TWAS, the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, has announced the winners of the TWAS Prizes for 2008. Each winner will receive a US$15,000 cheque and be asked to lecture about his or her research at TWAS's 20th General Meeting to take place in South Africa in October 2009.

SHAW Jei-Fu, president of National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan, China, has won the 2008 TWAS Prize in the agricultural sciences for his outstanding contributions to the use of enzyme biotechnology in extending the shelf lives of food commodities and for developing applications of enzyme biotechnology to improve high-value agricultural products.

Susana LOPEZ and Carlos ARIAS of the Biotechnology Institute of Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Cuernavaca, Mexico, have been named winners of the 2008 TWAS Prize in biology for their fundamental contributions to the understanding of pathogen-host cell interactions, particularly, of the early events of rotavirus cell infection.

ZHAO Dongyuan, professor, Department of Chemistry, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, has won the 2008 TWAS Prize in chemistry for his outstanding contributions in the research field of mesoporous materials.

SUN Jimin, professor, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, has won the 2008 TWAS Prize for earth sciences for his fundamental contributions to the studies of desert evolution and aeolian deposits.

Ashutosh SHARMA of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, has won the 2008 TWAS Prize in the engineering sciences for his fundamental contributions to meso-mechanics, instabilities and self-organization in soft thin films; meso-patterning; wetting; adhesion and interfacial interactions.

Vasudevan SRINIVAS of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, has been named the winner of the 2008 TWAS Prize in mathematics for his basic contributions to algebraic geometry that have helped deepen our understanding of cycles, motives and K-theory.

Salim S. ABDOOL KARIM of the Doris Duke Medical Research Institute, Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa has won the 2008 TWAS Prize in the medical sciences for his exceptional and distinguished contributions in medicine and public health, specifically for HIV prevention.

Ali Hani CHAMSEDDINE and Predhiman Krishan KAW share the 2008 TWAS Prize in Physics. Chamseddine, Physics Department of the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, is being honoured for his fundamental contributions to supergravity and noncommutative geometry. Kaw, Institute for Plasma Research in Bhat, Gandhinagar, India, is recognized for pioneering and seminal contributions to physics of laser plasma interactions, tokamak transport, current drive and magnetic reconnection, and dusty, quark-gluon and ionospheric plasmas.