Dr. Willmar-Schwabe-Young-Talent-Prize
The aim is to motivate young talents to address phytochemical and phytopharmacological questions, especially with potential clinical implications, in order to advance our understanding of the therapeutic potential of natural products.
Bestowed annually during GA conference
- Awarding Institution: Society for Medicinal Plant and Natural Product Research (GA)
- Endowing Sponsor: Dr. Willmar Schwabe GmbH & Co. KG, Karlsruhe (Germany)
- Endowment: 2,000 EURO
Application
- PhD students & Postdocs (normally 30 years or younger)
- GA membership for at least one year prior to application, with paid fees
- At least one peer-reviewed publication as 1st author is available and is being submitted as basis for the assessment (can be augmented by additional papers from the same topic), which is being accompanied by an
- application letter outlining the overarching research strategy (in hindsight and forward-looking) for the topic under evaluation
Jury
President of GA & nominee of the GA president & Schwabe representative, based on an evaluation report (evaluator/s selected by the GA president)
The deadline of submissions for the 2023 announcement is April 4, 2024 (via email to events@ga-online.org)
List of Award Winners
2023: Dr Adriano Rutz
Dr. Adriano Rutz is a pharmacist by training.
After working in the analytical research laboratory and R&D department of Tradall SA (Bacardi Group), he obtained his PhD in phytochemistry at the University of Geneva, under the supervision of Professor Jean-Luc Wolfender.
As an advocate of open science and open data, he is the proud author of the LOTUS initiative, a new way of sharing knowledge in the field of natural products research.
This initiative is a cornerstone of phytopharmacological research. Based on the valuable knowledge built over 100 years of phytochemical studies, LOTUS has the potential to facilitate the incorporation of natural products in the era of informatics. The LOTUS initiative promises to strengthen the foundations on which future phytochemical investigations will be conducted and helps building bridges to other fields. It is designed to efficiently inform machine learning strategies in the best circumstances. Its use can range from taxonomically informed metabolite annotation, to finding structural novelty, providing molecular arguments for biodiversity conservation up to guiding drug discovery for various diseases.
Adriano Rutz’s current research as a PostDoc (ETH Zurich) focuses on the development of open informatics tools and mass spectrometry-based strategies to better understand the chemistry of living organisms.
