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Four young researchers receive Kirstine Meyer´s Memorial Grant

Four young researchers receive Kirstine Meyer´s Memorial Grant

Prestigious scholarship for 4 young researchers.

On Wednesday 9 December, the Society for the Dissemination of Nature Doctrine gave the rare and very prestigious Kirstine Meyers Memorial Grant to as many as four young researchers: Astrid T. Rømer from the Niels Bohr Institute, Kasper S. Petersen from DTU Chemistry, Mathias Heltberg from the Niels Bohr Institute and Nikolaj Mandsberg from DTU Health Technology. Carlsberg's Memorial Grant supported the special distribution in 2020, as part of the national celebration of the 200th anniversary of H.C. Ørsted's discovery of electromagnetism, HCØ2020.

However, the ceremony itself had to be postponed from 9 December 2020 due to the stricter COVID-19 restrictions that were introduced a few days earlier. The award was held on 24 June 2020 with short lectures from the 4 scholarship recipients.

SNU President Dorte Olesen said: "Kirstine Meyer was the first woman in Denmark to become a Doctor of Philosophy (dr.phil.) in physics. Through her textbooks for school and her publication of Hans Christian Ørsted's collected works in 1920, she was pivotal to preserving the knowledge of Hans Christian Ørsted's original works, including that he gained international recognition for his discovery in 1825 of the element Aluminium. Therefore, it is natural in connection with the celebration HCØ2020 also to focus on Kirstine Meyer through four awards of the Memorial Grant that her friends and colleagues founded after her death in 1942.  The grant cannot be applied for, one has to be nominated by older scientists. Its recipients over time have all been excellent young researchers, the vast majority of whom have made their mark on their research field, and this year's recipients are especially outstanding."

Astrid T. Rømer's research at the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) is centered around new electromagnetic properties. The strange electrical properties of the superconductor, e.g. zero resistance, are a good example. She researches the understanding of new superconductors and their strange electromagnetic ways of working. There are few Danish researchers in this important field and Astrid Rømer does both experimental and theoretical research at the highest international level. Privately, she is the mother of 3 children and violinist in the Lyngby-Taarbæk Symphony Orchestra. She also attaches great importance to communicating her knowledge and held an exciting lecture on her research entitled: The Couple Dance of the Electrons.

Astrid Tranum Rømer

Kasper S. Pedersen from DTU Chemistry researches material design and moves in the boundary layer between synthetic chemistry, materials science and fasstof physics. His innovative research has already resulted in more than 50 publications in fine international journals such as Science and Nature Communications and he became a Young Investigator in 2017 and head of a research group whose results provide insight into the quantum information technology of the future and can be used in fuel cells for green transition. He has just also received a Sapere Aude DFF research leader grant and explained with great enthusiasm about his research with the lecture: Molecular Architecture – The 2nd Quantum Revolution.

Kasper Steen Pedersen

Mathias Heltberg works in the boundary area between physics and biology and works to understand the fundamental signaling mechanisms of living organisms. He grew up in rudersdal municipality, where he attended Trørødskolen and then Nærum Gymnasium. During his PhD he worked with mathematical descriptions of very different biological systems and for this was awarded the PhD prize at KU Science. He has previously been employed three months at CERN, six months at Harvard Medical School and two years in Paris at Ecole Normale Superieure, but is due to COVID-19 back in Denmark, where he also works for the Danish Serum Institute as a member of its COVID-19 Expert Group. Outside of physics, he is a football coach with a UEFA A licence. Mathias' lecture was titled: Complex dynamics in cell signaling.

Mathias Heltberg

Nikolaj K. Mandsberg from DTU Health Technology is an interdisciplinary researcher who, based on physics, attacks basic scientific issues as well as technical problems. His research spans wider than inverted pepper stars, super-black spiders and cell armor. At present, he is working, among other things, to develop capsules for collecting bacterial cultures from the gut. He previously researched at CalTech and Tokyo University and was a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard University. He will not complete his PhD until 1 April 2021, but with his strong background in nano- and microtechnology, has already published 9 articles in internationally renowned journals. Nikolaj has been to the Royal Life Guard and is a volunteer homework assistant in his spare time. Nikolaj told me about his research with the lecture: Bacteria, drops and spiders – how superficial a title!

Nikolaj K. Mandberg

The event was held on 24 June 2021 in the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, where Professor Flemming Besenbacher from the Carlsberg Foundation and the Carlsberg Memorial Grant for brewer J.C. Jacobsen presented the scholarship recipients with diplomas.

For more information, please contact the President of the SNUS, dr.scient. Dorte Olesen, tel: 29 92 63 00 – or by mail snu@naturvidenskab.net.

You can also read more about the scholarship and the previous recipients at https://naturlæren.dk/scholarship recipients/

About Kirstine Meyer´s Scholarship:

The full name of Kirstine Meyer's Grant is "Associate Professor, Dr.Phil., Mrs. Kirstine Meyer, née Bjerrum's Memorial Grant" and it was founded in 1942 by a circle of colleagues and friends who wanted to "put a memory of her that could bring testimony to future times of the admiration, hoisting and affection that contemporaries had for her". Among the scholarship's founders were colleagues Niels and Olaf Bjerrum and her fellow student Hanna Adler - the aunt of Niels Bohr. Hanna Adler and Kirstine Meyer in 1892 had been the first women to take a Master´s degree in physics. Niels Bohr signed the Statutes on behalf of the Society for the Spread of Nature. Kirstine Meyer received the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences Gold Medal in 1899 and became Denmark's first female dr.phil. in physics in 1909. Throughout her life, she was committed to reforming the school legislation, and she had a decisive influence on the introduction and curricula of chemistry and physics education in high school.

The scholarship was last awarded in 2014, and among the recipients of the ages are the astronomer Anja C. Andersen, the ice core scientist Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, the Nobel Laureate Aage Bohr and the later Rector of the University of Copenhagen, Ove Nathan.