Pakistan-born scientist to receive prestigious Leibniz Prizes

Pakistan-born scientist Asifa Akhtar among 10 others will receive prestigious Leibniz Prizes next year, the committee announced on Thursday.

Leibniz Prizes, most important research award in Germany for outstanding work from all scientific areas will be awarded on March 15 next year in a virtual ceremony.

Asifa Akhtar is the vice president of The Max Planck Society. It is Germany’s most successful research organisation. Since its establishment in 1948, no fewer than 18 Nobel laureates have emerged from the ranks of its scientists, putting it on a par with the best and most prestigious research institutions worldwide.

Born in Karachi, she obtained her doctorate at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, UK, in 1997. She then moved to Germany, where she was a Postdoctoral fellow at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and the Adolf-Butenandt-Institute in Munich from 1998 to 2001.

She was awarded the Early Career European Life Science Organisation Award in 2008, EMBO membership in 2013, and the Feldberg Prize in 2017. She was also elected as a member of the National Academy of Science Leopoldina in 2019.

The main committee of the German Research Foundation (DFG) awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize 2021 to four female and six male scientists. They were selected from 131 proposals by the relevant selection committee.

Of the ten winners, two each come from the humanities and social sciences, the natural sciences and engineering, and four from the life sciences. They will each receive a prize money of 2.5 million euros.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the main committee met by video conference. The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize has been awarded annually by the DFG since 1986.