Prof. Petr Cejka (IRB) receives the 2017 Friedrich Miescher Award

The LS2 section for Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, formerly the Swiss Society for Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, has the honor to continue to present the annual Friedrich Miescher award. This year's award recognizes the outstanding research accomplishments of Professor Petr Cejka.

This award is paying tribute to Prof. Cejka's outstanding continuous research accomplishments investigating the molecular mechanisms of DNA repair. The important contributions to the knowledge of DNA biochemistry and biology follow the inspiring discoveries of Friedrich Miescher.

The Jury Committee honors his discoveries, which started in Zurich during his PhD, continued in California as PostDoc and further emerged when he became a distinguished young group leader at the University of Zurich. The Jury Committee was particularly impressed by his persistent high-end publications starting from his PhD until very recently.

The Friedrich Miescher prize is awarded every year to a young researcher for outstanding work in the field of biochemistry in its broadest sense. The winner must have developed an independent research program in Switzerland or as a Swiss citizen abroad and be below the age of 40 years - or 42 for women with children.

The prize is funded by the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, which is part of the Novartis Research Foundation. It was awarded for the first time in 1970 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the discovery of nucleic acids by Friedrich Miescher. The prize committee is composed of seven representatives from the major Swiss Universities and the Friedrich Miescher Institute.

The award ceremony will take place on February 02, 2017 in Zurich.

Prof. Cejka joined the IRB as director of the Recombination Mechanisms laboratory in October 2016.