Jan Alfuth and Szymon Dudziak are among the winners of the FPS START Program | Faculty of Chemistry at the Gdańsk University of Technology

Annual scholarships for outstanding young scientists who are at the beginning of their scientific careers and have already documented outstanding achievements in their field of research were awarded as part of the 32nd edition of the competition. Among the 100 laureates there are two scientists from our Faculty: Jan Alfuth, PhD, Eng., and Szymon Dudziak, MSc, Eng.

The aim of the Program is to distinguish the most talented young scientists and encourage them to further scientific development by enabling them to fully devote themselves to research. Since 2009, the Foundation has been awarding distinctions in the program to people whose research achievements were rated as outstanding by the competition reviewers.

Jan Alfuth, PhD, Eng., is an assistant professor at the Department of Organic Chemistry, and his scientific interests focus on obtaining ordered supramolecular structures using non-covalent interactions. He defended his doctoral thesis entitled "Use of non-covalent bonds to obtain one- and two-component supramolecular structures" on 28 October 2022, and his achievements include 9 publications in which he is the first author. Among them it is worth to mention the article "Topochemical, Single-Crystal-to-Single-Crystal [ 2+2] Photocycloadditions Driven by Chalcogen-Bonding Interactions", which appeared in "Angewandte Chemie International Edition" (IF approx. 16.6)

Szymon Dudziak , MSc, Eng., conducts research focused on the design of photocatalytic materials based on the exposure of selected crystal planes to the reaction environment, at the Department of Process Engineering and Chemical Technology. He is a co-author of 19 publications with a total IF of approximately 125. Currently, he is managing the Preludium project: "Photocatalysts designed based on exposed crystal planes and their application in water purification."

The elite group of scholarship holders of the START program of the Foundation for Polish Science also includes the following researchers from Gdańsk University of Technology: Erwin Wojtczak, PhD, Eng., from the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Bartosz Kamecki, PhD, Eng., and Krystian Lankauf , MSc, Eng., from the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics.

We congratulate all the laureates and wish them further success and satisfaction!