News Release

Commitment to promoting understanding between Germany and Japan

DFG awards the Sixth Eugen and Ilse Seibold Prize

Grant and Award Announcement

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

This press release is also available in German.

The Japanese civil engineer, Professor Hideo Nakamura, and the former director of the Paul Drude Institute for Solid State Electronics in Berlin, Professor Klaus H. Ploog, are the recipients of the 2007 Eugen and Ilse Seibold Prize, awarded in recognition of their contribution to the advancement of science and mutual understanding between the two countries. This is the sixth time that the prize, which is worth 10,000 euros, will be given by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation).

Professor Nakamura has been dedicated to promoting interaction between young German and Japanese scientists and researchers for over 40 years. He has initiated summer schools and exchange programmes with various German universities, which have given Japanese and German students the opportunity to get to know each other’s country. He has also needed to overcome diplomatic hurdles on a couple of occasions. For instance, in the past he maintained contact with colleagues in the German Democratic Republic, and even arranged for them to visit Japan. Professor Nakamura’s research deals with traffic planning, and he has been the president of the Institute for Transport Policy Studies in Tokyo, which was founded especially for him, since becoming an emeritus professor in 1996. His pioneering work on digital landscape models has also been adopted in German traffic planning.

Numerous working visits to Japanese research institutions preceded the intense scientific cooperation between Germany and Japan that Professor Ploog promoted as the director of the Paul Drude Institute for Solid State Electronics in Berlin. In addition to organising regular exchanges between German and Japanese researchers, particularly working in the field of semiconductors, Professor Ploog has also been dedicated to promoting scientific cooperation between the two countries in a variety of other roles. For example, he was honorary head of the scientific working group at the Japanese-German Center (JDZB) in Berlin and an organiser of several German-Japanese projects. Professor Ploog continued to maintain his links with Japan even after becoming an emeritus professor at the end of 2006. He is currently a visiting professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

The Eugen and Ilse Seibold Prize is named after the marine geologist and former President of the DFG, Professor Eugen Seibold, and his wife, Dr. Ilse Seibold. The couple donated 150,000 euros for the establishment of a fund to finance the prize. The fund is part of the world's largest award for environmental research, the Japanese Asahi Glass Foundation's "Blue Planet Prize". This prize, worth 400,000 euros, was awarded jointly to Eugen Seibold and American environmentalist Lester Brown in 1994. The Eugen and Ilse Seibold Prize is awarded every two years to one German and one Japanese scientist whose outstanding academic achievements have contributed to better understanding between the two countries.

The prize will be awarded on 2 May 2007 at the German Museum in Bonn.

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Further information on the Eugen and Ilse Seibold Prize and this year’s winners is available at www.dfg.de.


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