The winners of this year’s Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists  in the UK are:

Life Sciences Laureate: Prof. Christopher Stewart (Newcastle University): Christopher leads a laboratory where groundbreaking research on microbiome-based therapies for pre-natal infant mortality is already making a life-saving impact.

Chemical Sciences Laureate: Prof. Liam Ball (University of Nottingham): Liam has transformed green manufacturing on an industrial scale, developing safer and more efficient methods of producing pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals with minimal environmental impact.

Physical Sciences & Engineering Laureate: Prof. Benjamin Mills (University of Leeds): Benjamin is transforming our understanding of climate change on earth and in space with revolutionary methods to predict long-term climate change. His research not only uncovers Earth’s climate history over billions of years, but also how other planets might evolve to support life.

As the largest unrestricted prize for UK scientists under the age of 42, the Blavatnik Awards celebrate Britain’s greatest young minds in their fields. This year, the three Laureates—each awarded £100,000 in unrestricted funds—were chosen from a shortlist of nine finalists, representing some of the brightest young scientific minds across the UK.

Among them, the three Laureates are tackling some of the most complex and pressing issues in science and society:  infant mortality, green manufacturing and predicting long-term climate change.

Tonight’s prize-giving gala at The Orangery, Kensington Palace highlights the growing impact of regional universities across the UK driving scientific breakthroughs.

Seoul National University College of Engineering announced that Professor Jungwon Park’s research team from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering has developed a groundbreaking technology to observe atomic structural changes of nanoparticles in three dimensions. This study, recognized as a revolutionary achievement that resolves a long-standing challenge even past Nobel laureates could not solve, was published online in Nature Communications, one of the most prestigious international journals, on January 29.

Two experiment collaborations, the g2p and EG4 collaborations, combined their complementary data on the proton’s inner structure to improve calculations of a phenomenon in atomic physics known as the hyperfine splitting of hydrogen. An atom of hydrogen is made up of an electron orbiting a proton. The overall energy level of hydrogen depends on the spin orientation of the proton and electron. If one is up and one is down, the atom will be in its lowest energy state. But if the spins of these particles are the same, the energy level of the atom will increase by a small, or hyperfine, amount. These spin-born differences in the energy level of an atom are known as hyperfine splitting.

The core of this article is to explore the mechanism by which the ruthenium (Ru) integration effect influences ruthenium-cobalt (RuCo) bimetallic nanoparticles in enhancing water-splitting properties. The research team synthesized RuCo bimetallic nanoparticles (RuCo@NC) with atomically dispersed Ru on nitrogen-doped carbon. They found that atomically dispersed Ru not only serves as the primary active site for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) but also promotes the oxidation of the Co surface to CoOOH*, thereby becoming a highly active site for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The optimized catalyst, RuCo@NC-1, exhibited outstanding performance. In alkaline conditions, it required only 217 and 96 mV of overpotential to reach a current density of 10 mA‧cm⁻² for OER and HER, respectively. This study offers valuable insights into the design of Ru-based electrocatalysts for water splitting.