CEITEC BUT Director Radimír Vrba presents awards for 2022

For the third year in a row, Director of CEITEC Brno University of Technology Radimír Vrba has presented awards for the greatest scientific achievements from the previous year with the Director's Award. As in previous years, the best PhD student, scientific publication and research project were selected.

Student of the Year 2022

Michaela Vojniková received the award not only for her achievements in the field of science popularization, but also for the results of her research to date. In the first year of her PhD studies, she had already become the winner of the international Falling Walls Czech Republic competition and advanced to the world finals in Berlin. In the same year she also succeeded in the prestigious Brno Ph.D. talent competition and received financial support for her research for the next three years. Last year she represented the Czech Republic in the new European Commission competition EUTalentOn.

In 2022, she also served as a mentor at the CEITEC Student Talent Summer School for high school students, where she led a topic focusing on the production of smart nanodevices for personalized treatment of serious diseases. The importance of her mentoring is also evidenced by the fact that one of the students with a project that she researched within the group won the national round in Slovakia and together with Michaela will go to present this project at the global finals of the ISEF 2023 competition in the USA.

Michaela has also succeeded, for example, in the Vševěd competition and is very active on social media within her channel Chemistry of Life.

Publication of the Year 2022

The increasing use of plastic materials has led to a constant accumulation of waste in the marine environment, where it breaks down into hazardous micro- and nanoplastics. Over the past year, scientists in Martin Pumera's research group have been exploring the potential of technology to degrade these plastics. In an award-winning publication, they critically reviewed the most advanced strategies for their capture and subsequent degradation by autonomous nano/microrobots.

The research, published in the prestigious journal Advanced Functional Materials, includes an introduction to the main driving mechanisms and experimental techniques for studying the degradation of nano/microplastics. The authors of the award-winning publication, Mario Urso and Martin Pumera from CEITEC BUT, also proactively discuss here the upcoming challenges in the field of water purification from nano/microplastics and other pollutants.

You can read the publication HERE.

Project of the Year 2022

The METASPIN project, whose principal investigator is Vojtěch Uhlíř, head of the Nanomagnetism and Spintronics research group at CEITEC BUT, was selected as the best one. The project deals with a completely new technology of artificial synapses with low energy consumption based on spintronic nanodevices. These synapses should prevent memory loss of previously learned tasks while learning new ones. This is in fact a major shortcoming that all AI applications currently face.

METASPIN is a project funded by the European Innovation Council's prestigious Pathfinder research programme under the European Union's new Horizon Europe programme. The project involves three European universities (Université Paris-Saclay, Brno University of Technology and University of Zurich), two research institutes (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and Forschungzentrum Jülich), and three science and technology companies (Spin-Ion Technologies, HawAI.Tech and Singulus Technologies).

You can find out more about the project HERE.

Author: CEITEC BUT