One of the highlights of the Symposium was the presentation of the ZEISS Research Award 2020 and the Carl Zeiss Award for Young Researchers.
Dr. Karl Lamprecht, ZEISS President and CEO, welcomed the top international researchers taking part in the event. "This award honors exceptional research in optics or photonics. Key factors that helped the illustrious jury make its decision was the possibility of putting these research outcomes into action and their potential for helping to develop innovative technologies.“
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Mlynek from the Humboldt University of Berlin, former President of the Helmholtz Association and chairman of this year's jury, presented the ZEISS Research Award 2020 to Prof. Dr. Jian-Wei Pan, Professor at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. Professor Pan was honored for his research into quantum technology. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the awards ceremony was combined with the virtual Symposium 2021.
In his laudatory speech, Mlynek underlined the highly remarkable outcomes achieved by Prof. Jian-Wei Pan and their huge potential for enabling further findings and for practical application. Pan's research laid important foundations for optical quantum communication. "The research work shows a way to scale up such systems and thus to make practical use of their advantages," says Mlynek.
The ZEISS Research Award is the successor to the Carl Zeiss Research Award, which was first presented in 1990. The ZEISS Research Award has been presented every two years since 2016. It honors outstanding achievements in international optical research and has been allocated prize money totaling €40,000. Many of the winners went on to obtain further important awards and distinctions; four of them were even honored with the Nobel Prize (more information on the ZEISS Research Award and the winners is available here).
Since 2016, independently of the ZEISS Research Award, the Ernst Abbe Foundation in the Donors’ Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanities in Germany has been presenting a research award with a focus on up-and-coming talent: the Carl Zeiss Award for Young Researchers. The Young Researchers Award was also presented to Dr. Christian Haffner (Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre, IMEC), Dr. Stefan Heist (Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Mechanics, IOF) and Dr. Fabian Wolf (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, PTB) during the Symposium.
More information on the ZEISS Symposium and the ZEISS Research Award is available at: