FNP START Programme Winners Receive 2022 Polityka Science Awards

19 October 2022

"For the 22nd time, the Polityka weekly awarded prestigious prizes to the most talented young scientists. As many as three researchers from among the five winners selected this year are grantees of the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP). Polityka awards prizes in five categories: humanities, technical sciences, social sciences, exact sciences, and life sciences. For their outstanding achievements and contributions to the development of science, each winner is awarded the prize of PLN 15,000 and an opportunity to give an interview in the Polityka weekly. The remaining ten finalists received prizes of PLN 5000. Among this year?s winners were beneficiaries of the FNP START programme: Dr. Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, Prof. Joanna Rak, and Dr. Eng. Żaneta Świderska-Chadaj. Dr. Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska ? a 2018 START programme grantee and winner of the Polityka Science Award in the humanities ? specializes in cultural studies, Czech studies, and ethnology. She works as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Her research interests concentrate on the issue of postwar resettlements in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Ćwiek-Rogalska focuses on the experiences of new settlers and their relationship to the belongings left behind by the previous residents. She succeeded in introducing this theme ? set in the local context of Central Europe ? to global scientific debates. Prof. Joanna Rak ? a 2019 START programme grantee and winner of the Polityka Science Award in social sciences ? works at the Department of Political Culture at the Faculty of Political Science and Journalism at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Rak focuses on social protests and the condition of democracy, with a particular focus on the motivation and involvement of demonstrators, along with their relations with the authorities. As part of her analyses, Rak formulated a groundbreaking theory on the different use of political violence by democratic and anti-democratic forces. Dr. Żaneta Świderska-Chadaj ? a 2020 START programme grantee and winner of the Polityka Science Award in technical sciences ? works as an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology. Świderska-Chadaj is an expert in biomedical and biological image analysis. She has developed algorithms to support the histopathological diagnosis of lung cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, DLBCL lymphoma, and kidney disease. The software she developed also allows for detecting the presence of immune cells that may suggest the effectiveness of a specific treatment. The Polityka Weekly Foundation has been running the ?Stay with us!? stipend programme aimed at young scientists since 2001 ? since 2011 rebranded to Polityka Science Awards. This year?s awards ceremony was held at Polityka headquarters on Sunday, October 16, 2022. We congratulate all the winners and wish them further success! For more information on this year?s finalists and winners, see the Polityka weekly website.