EU welcomes Nobel award to MSCA researcher
European commissioners Androulla Vassiliou and Máire Geoghegan-Quinn have welcomed the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2014 to Eric Betzig, Stefan W Hell and William E Moerner “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”.
While Betzig and Moerner work in the US, Hell is German and works at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg.
Throughout his career, Hell has received support from the EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). He was himself an MSCA fellow at the University of Turku in 1996-1997, and then co-ordinator for three MSCA individual fellowships. On top of that, he and his colleagues participated in collaborative projects funded by the EU.
Vassiliou, responsible for the MSCA scheme, and Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Geoghegan-Quinn said: “We warmly congratulate Stefan W Hell, Eric Betzig, and William E Moerner on their achievement. Outstanding researchers like Stefan W Hell are an excellent example of what European research mobility can achieve, and through his mentoring of younger MSCA researchers, in fostering excellence in the new generation of researchers in Europe. The MSCAs support researchers’ mobility, thereby allowing them to acquire new knowledge and skills on cutting edge science.”
Stefan W Hell was awarded a Postdoctoral Individual Fellowship in 1996. He then became a mentor for several promising Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellows. His latest MSCA project ended as recently as May 2014.
The announcement of the Nobel Prize for Professor Hell comes only two days after this year’s award in physiology or medicine went to John O´Keefe, May‐Britt Moser and Edvard I Moser. Both May‐Britt and Edvard Moser are recipients of European Research Council grants, whilst all three have participated in EU-funded research projects, including the MSCAs.
Additionally, Hiroshi Amano, one of this year’s laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded on 7 October, has previously collaborated with an EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Initial Training Network.
