fot. yara.com

Dr. Mateusz Sowiński from the Faculty of Chemistry has received the prestigious Norwegian Yara’s Birkeland Prize. He was recognised for his doctoral research on stable radicals that could help scientists study the structure of proteins inside living cells. He received the prize at a ceremony in Oslo.

Yara International awards the Birkeland Prize for an outstanding doctoral thesis defended at a Norwegian university. Since 2009, it has been presented annually to an early career researcher, alternating between chemistry and physics. The winner is selected by a five member committee representing Yara, the Norwegian Chemical Society and the Norwegian Physical Society.

The prize is named after Kristian Birkeland, a Norwegian physicist and inventor. His research into extracting nitrogen from the air laid the groundwork for fertiliser production technology that forms part of Yara’s history. The annual Birkeland Lecture, at which the prize was presented, was organised jointly by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Yara, the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Space Centre.

Dr. Sowiński defended his PhD at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. For his thesis, he developed stable aminoxyl radicals, also known as nitroxide radicals, that can serve as spin labels in studies of protein structure using electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR). He created three such labels and used them to label proteins. His results suggest that they could also be used in future measurements inside living cells.

At the ceremony held at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, he presented the results of his doctoral research and discussed the work he is now carrying out at Wrocław Tech’s Faculty of Chemistry.

Dr. Sowiński currently works in the Department of Bioorganic Chemistry at Wrocław Tech’s Faculty of Chemistry. As part of Prof. Łukasz Berlicki’s team, he studies the use of mini-proteins, small proteins designed from scratch, as catalysts in aminocatalysis.
The aim is to develop selective mini-protein catalysts for challenging chemical reactions. As with enzymes, the shape of the mini-protein determines how the reaction proceeds.

The researcher recently also received a SONATINA grant from the National Science Centre to continue his work on radicals. This time, he will use them to build biocatalysts for the selective production of compounds that could be useful in manufacturing medicines, among other applications.

He received nearly PLN 761,000 for the project, which includes a six month research stay at Stanford University. There, he will work with Prof. Song Lin’s team on combining biocatalysis with electrocatalysis.