Prestigious Award for Young ESRF User

The European Young Researchers' Award is granted yearly by Euroscience to a scientist demonstrating outstanding research performance. At the same time, the Award aims to inspire early stage researchers and experienced researchers to incorporate a European dimension and perspective into their work.

Dorthe Ravnsbæk from the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center, iNANO, at Aarhus is currently finishing off her PhD dissertation. Her research aims to find new materials for storing hydrogen, so that we can use sustainable energy sources in future as fuel in transport. For these experiments, Dorthe has been a regular visitor to the Swiss-Norwegian Beamlines BM01 at the ESRF, more recently also as a guest scientist working together with Yaroslav Filinchuk, now at the Université Catholique de Louvain. 

The selection committee gave the following justification for its choice: “Dorthe B. Ravnsbæk is an outstanding, visionary, inspiring and outgoing young researcher. In spite of only 3.5 years’ career, Ravnsbæk’s work has already attracted international attention demonstrated by an impressive number of publications in international peer reviewed journals and she has built an extensive research network in Europe. The fact that she has nine oral presentations of which four are invited and one will be at a Gordon conference, at this early stage in her career is truly impressive.”

The Award is granted each year but the prize-giving-ceremony is held every two years at the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) where the two recipients present their work. The Award consists of a Medal and a Certificate. A part of the award is a travel and accommodation grant for the stay in the ESOF city which in 2012 will be Dublin (Ireland).

Top image: The happy winner of the award