Five young scientists from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel have been honored with the 2026 ULB-VUB Syensqo Awards. This annual prize, awarded by the Syensqo Fund, recognizes researchers who obtained their doctorate at the VUB or ULB within the past year. This edition's honors for the VUB go to Meisam Dabiri Havigh, Pedro Jorge, Yana Girardin, Konstantina Tzavella, and Bin Wang. They will receive their awards on October 25 during the Public Lectures of the International Solvay Institutes in Brussels. The prize money amounts to 3,000 euros per researcher.
Scientific quality is the most important criterion for the jury when selecting the laureates. Additionally, strong emphasis is placed on the candidates' ability to explain their research clearly to a broad audience. The prize aims to encourage young researchers to build careers in scientific and technological domains that are essential for today's and tomorrow's industrial development. Furthermore, it seeks to stimulate their inventiveness and urge them to consider how their research can contribute to societal progress.
The namesake and financier of the fund is the Belgian multinational Syensqo, which emerged in late 2023 following the split of Solvay. The materials and chemicals company primarily develops advanced materials, specialty chemicals, and high-tech polymers intended for industries such as aerospace, electronics, batteries, healthcare, and sustainable energy.
New insights into electrochemical processes
Meisam Dabiri Havigh was honored for his research into electrochemical processes. He developed a method to monitor them while they are still occurring. He applied the technique to batteries and to methods for better protecting metals against wear and corrosion. His doctorate is titled Development of operando ORP-EIS for monitoring ongoing electrochemical processes.
Pedro Jorge received the prize for his research on satellites flying in a very low orbit around the Earth. He investigated how materials aboard these satellites react to atmospheric gases and plasma. His work combines experiments and simulations to better understand these interactions. The title of his doctorate is Gas and Plasma Surface Interactions in Hyperthermal Rarefied Flows: Application to Very Low Earth Orbit Platforms
Better insight into bacterial toxins
Yana Girardin receives an award for her research into the bacterium that causes cholera, Vibrio cholerae. Her research focused on a mechanism of this bacterium in which a harmful substance is countered by a protective substance. Among other things, she studied how the toxin ParE2 affects an essential bacterial enzyme and how the antitoxin ParD2 neutralizes that action. Her doctorate is titled Exploring the interaction landscape of Vibrio cholerae toxin ParE2: Gyrase inhibition and neutralization by ParD2.
AI for predicting mutation effects
Konstantina Tzavella was distinguished for her research into proteins. Using AI and evolutionary information, she better predicted how genetic changes affect protein function. Her doctorate was conducted within the interdisciplinary TumorScope project of VUB and UZ Brussel. Her doctorate is titled *Combining protein Language Models and Evolutionary Information in a constrained Foundation Model to explore the sequence space and predict the effect of mutations on protein behavior.
New methods in theoretical chemistry
The fifth VUB laureate, Bin Wang, worked on the further development of so-called Conceptual Density Functional Theory. This is a theory that helps predict how chemical substances react with one another. His research led to new analytical methods and applications within this domain. His award-winning doctorate is titled Towards Analytical Conceptual Density Functional Theory: Fundamentals, Implementation and Applications.