Philippe Schwaller – making chemistry with linguistic algorithms
How do you use artificial intelligence to simulate chemical processes? Philippe Schwaller has developed a program that has been named the best of its kind by an independent research group.
Image: Urs Wäfler
Claudia Aloisi – Harnessing the beauty of chemistry
Her work could pave the way for new forms of cancer screening: Claudia Aloisi researched a new method for quantifying and determining DNA damage at ETH Zurich. She got the Prix Schläfli award in chemistry for this.
Image: ETH Zürich / Nicola Pitaro
Robert Pollice - What holds the world together
He won medals at international chemistry olympiads even as a teenager. Now Robert Pollice adds to his collection the Prix Schläfli in Chemistry, for researching material properties that are, amongst other things, important in nanomedicine.
Murielle Delley - the privilege of life-long learning
When asked about her motivation to study chemistry, Murielle Delley explains that she has always wanted to know how things work. When it came to understanding what was happening around us - everyday science, so to speak - she was more attracted to chemistry than to physics, for example. Well, that was originally the case. Over the years she naturally also turned to more specific, less everyday problems, most recently the surfaces of catalysts.
Image: Bernard Delley
Prix Schläfli 2018 in Chemistry: Xiaojiang Xie
He is described as a "volcano of scientific ideas" by Eric Bakker, his PhD supervisor at the University of Geneva. Xiaojiang Xie laughs a little when he hears this on the phone in his hometown of Shenzen, to which he returned two years ago. Prior to that, he had been a researcher for five years in Geneva and Paris, where he launched a career that would make the world sit up and take notice.
Image: Xiaojiang Xie
