Archived Awards and Honors

On May 24, 2022, Prof. Tomaž Prosen from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia received the "Physik-Preis Dresden" (Dresden Physics Prize), jointly awarded by the TU Dresden and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS). The theoretical physicist receives the award for his outstanding work on quantum mechanical many-body systems, nonequilibrium statistical physics, quantum information, classical chaos and quantum chaos. Tomaž Prosen has authored over 200 publications on this broad range of topics, which have over 7000 citations and are recognized in expert circles worldwide. In 2016, he received a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant. The award ceremony took place at a festive colloquium in the Recknagel Building of the TU Dresden, preceded by a reception. Prof. Carsten Timm, Dean of the Faculty of Physics, gave the welcome address, and Prof. Roderich Moessner of MPI-PKS delivered the laudation. The Physik-Preis Dresden was endowed in 2015 by Dresden physicist Prof. Peter Fulde, the founding director of the MPI-PKS. The prize winners are determined by a joint commission of the TU Dresden and the MPI-PKS. In addition to the central criterion of scientific excellence, it is particularly important for the decision that the work of the award winners is of special significance for the cooperation between the two DRESDEN-concept partners MPI-PKS and TU Dresden and that their connection has been further strengthened in the long term. The 2022 awardee, Prof. Tomaž Prosen, has a wide range of connections to the professorships at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at TU Dresden and at MPI-PKS due to his broad scientific orientation.

ERC Consolidator Grant for Jan Brugués

Today, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the winners of its latest  Consolidator Grant competition for ambitious mid-career researchers. Jan Brugués, research group leader both at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS) is one of the 313 laureates who were awarded the 2022 ERC Consolidator Grants. The funding is part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, and the winners will receive in total 632 million Euros to tackle big scientific questions. In total, 2,652 applicants submitted proposals and 12% of them will receive the funding. Male and female applicants were equally successful in winning the grants. The future grantees will carry out their projects at universities and research centers across 24 EU Member States and associated countries. This new round of grants will create an estimated 1,900 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and other staff at 189 host institutions.
Jan receives the grant for his project “Understanding emergent physical properties of chromatin using synthetic nuclei.” The main goal of this project is to resolve how the physics of molecular-scale activities result in the material properties of chromatin and how those contribute to chromatin organization and function. Jan Brugués explains: “With my project, I hope to provide a physical description of the material state of chromatin across different scales and contribute to reveal the basic physical principles that govern nuclear organization and function.”
Congratulations Jan!

Steffen Rulands receives funding within the REDESIGN consortium to bring personalized cancer therapy to patients using organoids and predictive models. The Saxon Ministry for Science, Arts and Tourism is funding four research projects for individualized cancer therapy with around 2.3 million euros. The projects will start this year and run for three years. One of the projects is the REDESIGN consortium with the goal to develope personalized medical therapy of Gastric Cancer. This type of cancer is difficult to treat once resistance to standard chemotherapy develops. Therefore, there is a need to tailor the therapy to each patient. The REDESIGN consortium is led by Daniel E. Stange (University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus Dresden), in collaboration with Steffen Rulands, Bon-Kyoung Koo (Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences), and Mette N. Svendsen (University of Copenhagen). Steffen Rulands will use functional drug response data generated from patient-derived organoids to predict the efficacy of different regimines of chemotherapy. These organoids are initially grown by clinical research labs from patient tumor tissue samples’and then exposed to varying cocktails of chemotherapy. Organoids are sequenced before and after treatment to detect mutations that may affect the outcome of therapy. Moreover, organoid growth speed, among other parameters, are measured during the treatment. These datasets will be used by Steffen's group to develop quantitative predictions of treatment efficiency using two complementary approaches, stochastic models and deep neural networks. The combination of the two methods will allow for high predictive and explanatory power while tackling the complexity of the data. This complexity arises from the presence of mixed populations of cells in the tumor and different constellations of mutations between tumors from different patients. Eventually, the developed model will help understand how resistance to therapy develops. More importantly, it will predict how any given patient would respond to chemotherapy based on the constellation of mutations found in the tumor. It will also assess the likelihood of tumor relapse in patients for each possible therapeutic approach and recommend the therapy that targets the tumor cells carrying mutations that make the tumor more aggressive and relapsing.