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Nobel Prize in Chemistry shows Russia's merits in science — Russian Academy of Sciences

"This year's prize once again showed that the Russian scientific school of chemistry is one of the leading schools in the world," Stepan Kalmykov underscored

MOSCOW, October 4. /TASS/. The 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which was awarded to, among others, Alexei Ekimov, a representative of the Soviet and Russian scientific school, confirmed the excellence of Russia’s work in chemistry, Stepan Kalmykov, a vice president at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told TASS.

"A scientist with Soviet, Russian roots received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the first time since the middle of the 20th century, when Soviet academician Nikolay Nikolayevich Semyonov was the 1956 laureate. This year's prize once again showed that the Russian scientific school of chemistry is one of the leading schools in the world," he said.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences earlier held a ceremony to announce the winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They are US nationals Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Russian national Alexei Ekimov. The prize was awarded for the discovery and development of quantum dots, the committee said in a statement.

Ekimov’s bio

Alexei Ekimov was born on February 28, 1945. He graduated from what now is Saint Petersburg State University in 1967. Ekimov is a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences. He worked at Vavilov State Optical Institute from 1977. In 1999, he started work as chief scientist at Nanocrystals Technology Inc., New York, US.

He was a visiting professor at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and Claude Bernard University in Lyon, France; at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany; and Osaka University, Japan.

Ekimov is a laureate of the State Prize of the USSR (1976, for the series of works titled "Detection and study of new phenomena related to the optical orientation of electron and nuclear spins in semiconductors"). In 2006, the Optical Society of America awarded Ekimov (along with another Russian, Alexander Efros, and US physicist Louis Bruce) the R. W. Wood Prize for the discovery of nanocrystal quantum dots and pioneering studies of their electronic and optical properties.