Winners of the 2018 and 2019 IUPAC-SOLVAY International Award for Young Chemists

IUPAC created a Prize for Young Chemists in 2000 to recognise and reward outstanding research scientists at the beginning of their careers. Since 2014, this has been generously sponsored by Solvay, and five IUPAC-SOLVAY International Awards for Young Chemists are given each year. The success of this initiative can be seen by since 2014 many of the awardees going on to highly successful careers [1]. Award winners are chosen from among dozens of applicants, based on detailed analysis of a 1000-word essay on the candidate’s Ph. D. work by a Jury, comprised of members of the IUPAC Bureau and a Senior Science Advisor from Solvay. The Jury has a wide range of expertise in chemistry, and makes efforts to ensure inclusivity with respect to gender and geographical distribution in their selection of the winners. It was chaired in 2018 and 2019 by Professor Natalia Tarasova, IUPAC Past President. The winners each received a cash prize of USD 1000 and travel expenses to the 47^th IUPAC World Chemistry Congress, 7–12 July 2019, in Paris, France. They were also invited to present a poster at the IUPAC Congress describing their award-winning work and to submit a short critical review to be published in Pure and Applied Chemistry. The awards were presented during the Opening Ceremony of the Congress.

There was a good global representation of candidates, with 45 applications from 15 countries in 2018, and 30 application from 14 countries in 2019. After consideration of the quality, originality and importance of the presentations, the Jury decided unanimously to award the 2018 prizes to the following five essays:

1. Eduardo Bolea-Fernandez, Ghent University, Belgium, “Method development for ultra-trace elemental and isotopic analysis using tandem ICP-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS/MS)”.

2. Dane W. deQuilettes, University of Washington, USA, “Probing Local Heterogeneity in the Optoelectronic Properties of Organic-Inorganic Perovskites Using Fluorescence Microscopy”.

3. Palas Roy, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India, “Probing the Fate of Excitons in Organic Semiconductors”.

4. Monika Stolar, University of Calgary, Canada, “Development of Phosphoryl-Bridged Viologens Toward Functional Materials”.

5. Chi Zhang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, “Cysteine Arylation”.

and the 2019 awards to the essays:

1. Yuanwen Jiang, University of Chicago, USA, “Rational design of silicon structures for multi-scale biointerfaces”.

2. Sung-Fu Hung, National Taiwan University, Republic of China, “Development of High-efficient Electrocatalysts and Photoelectrocatalysts and their in-/ex-situ analysis”.

3. Alexander Fawcett, University of Bristol, UK, “New Developments in Organoboron Incorporation, Homologation, and Functionalization”.

4. Ye Zhang, Fudan University, Peoples Republic of China, “High-Performance Fiber-Shaped Lithium-Ion Battery”.

5. Luis Rafael De Jesus Baez, Texas A&M University, USA,“The Secret Lives of Battery Materials: Core-level Spectroscopy as a Probe of Compositional and Electronic Structure Inhomogeneities”.

In this issue of Pure and Applied Chemistry, we include the papers from Monika Stolar, Palas Roy, Dane W. deQuilettes, Ye Zhang, Alexander Fawcett, and Sung-Fu Hung.

Papers from the winners of the 2017 IUPAC-SOLVAY International Award for Young Chemists were published in 2018 [2].