On Wednesday evening, the Werner von Siemens Prizes 2023 were awarded to the best students, young researchers and teachers. The winning entries from the fields of engineering and science were selected by expert juries in several categories.
The Best Dissertation 2023 category was won by Kateřina Snopková and her supervisor David Šmajs from the Faculty of Medicine. The jury awarded her thesis entitled Genomics of bacteriocinogenic gammaproteobacteria and analysis of newly described bacteriocins. Kateřina Snopková’s work identified and characterised new bacteriocins – products of bacteria that can kill other bacteria. The results of this work have considerable potential for practical application. She has discovered antimicrobial agents that have very interesting properties and are an alternative to classical antibiotics.
The third place in the category of the best graduate thesis dealing with Smart Infrastructure and Energy was awarded to Stanislav Chren and Barbora Bühnová for the Faculty of Informatics, who was the supervisor of his thesis entitled Multi-layered Reliability Analysis of Smart Grids.
The award for overcoming obstacles in studying, which was awarded to Veronika Kamenská, a technician of the Simulation Centre of the MU Faculty of Medicine and a doctoral student, can also be considered a prize for Masaryk University. Although she suffers from congenital visual impairment and mental illness, she is studying at the Faculty of Engineering at Brno University of Technology.
From a total of 496 entries, the expert juries selected 20 winners to share one million crowns this year. The first place in the number of awards went to the Czech Technical University in Prague (6 winners), followed by the Czech Academy of Sciences (5 winners) and Brno University of Technology (3 winners), Palacký University Olomouc and Masaryk University (2 winners each), Charles University and the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice (1 winner each). Since the beginning of the competition, 16.4 million crowns have been distributed among the winners.
“In the twenty-sixth year of the competition, we have honoured quite extraordinary dissertations and people,” said Eduard Palíšek, CEO of Siemens Czech Republic. “It’s not just about the excellent quality of the papers, but above all about their topics, which focus on pressing problems facing humanity. This edition of the competition has clearly shown that students and teachers at our universities achieve results comparable to the best in the world,” Palíšek added.
About the Werner von Siemens Prize
The Werner von Siemens Prize has been organised for 26 years by Siemens Czech Republic in partnership with important representatives of universities and the Czech Academy of Sciences, who are also the guarantors of the individual categories and participate in the evaluation of the submitted works. This year, 60 experts, representatives of academia and non-profit organisations sat on the independent juries. In terms of its scope, the amount of financial rewards and its history, the Werner von Siemens Prize is one of the most important independent initiatives of this kind in the Czech Republic.