Siemens Awarded Matfyz Graduates
Markéta Bocková and Libor Šmejkal, graduates of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the UK, took the prestigious Werner von Siemens Awards. Both succeeded in the category of best dissertations, Dr Bocková also won an award for best scientific work written by a woman.
The competition called Werner von Siemens Awards for the best students, educators and young scientists is organised by Siemens together with important representatives of universities and the Czech Academy of Sciences. During its 23rd year, the jury selected from 712 applications and 900,000 CZK was distributed among the twenty-one awarded scientists.
First place at the Werner von Siemens 2020 Award for Best Dissertation and Best Female Scientific Work at the same time was given to Markéta Bocková for work called Multifunctional biomolecular assemblies for parallelized analysis of biomolecular interactions. Within her research she focused on optical biosensors and subsequently their usage to study biomolecules and biomolecular interactions. Biosensors offer a wide range of application possibilities and the results of Dr Bocková could find widespread utilization in medical research and diagnostics in the future.
The second place in the best dissertation category was also taken by a Matfyz graduate. Libor Šmejkal was awarded for his work on the Topological band theory of relativistic spintronics in antiferromagnets. As part of that, he studied the movement of electrons in crystals and explored how to achieve greater mobility, lower energy loss and as much signal/noise ratio as possible. The results of the research can thus be used to map anti-ferromagnetic crystals in detail, and utilized in the future, for example, in computer memories, transistors or even neuromorphic computers.
