In 2024, the Franzosini Prize was presented to Cezary Gumiński and to Christian Ekberg, and the very first Balarew Award was presented to Märt Lõkov
Franzosini Prize
In the year of 2024 two Franzosini Prizes were given to
- Cezary Gumiński from the University of Warsaw, Poland, and to
- Christian Ekberg from the University of Göteborg in Sweden
The winners of the Franzosini Prize were announced during the International Symposium on Solubility Phenomena and Related Equilibrium Processes (ISSP21) and each gave an oral presentation. Cezary Gumiński spoke about “My adventures with the solubility data”, while Christian Ekberg spoke about “Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis of chemical modelling and experiments”.
Cezary Gumiński is a Polish chemist who studied and completed his entire academic career at the University of Warsaw, Department of Chemistry. The first time he attended a meeting of the Solubility Data Commission (IUPAC Commission V. 8) was during the IUPAC General Assembly held in Lyngby, Denmark, in 1983, where he was Observer Member. He has been an active member of IUPAC since 1984, with an extraordinary contribution, having edited and/or contributed to nine volumes of the Solubility Data Series and a tenth one is under preparation, and in recent years, he has also been involved in the critical evaluation of homogeneous systems equilibrium data. The critical evaluation of solubility data covered a wide range of systems of technological and scientific interest, such as metals in mercury and liquid alkali metals, or rare earth metal salts in water and aqueous solutions. In the last ten years, he is also participating in the critical evaluation of stability constant data for metal-ion/tetraoxidosulfate complexes in homogeneous solutions. As part of this project, led by Glenn Hefter, a Technical Report was submitted in 2024 for publication in Pure and Applied Chemistry, with a critical analysis of more than 400 data solely on the ionization constants of sulfuric acid. He also published six chapters in books and more than one hundred papers in international referred journals on some of his scientific interests as diffusional aspects of electroanalytical techniques, equilibria and kinetics of formation of cryptate complexes in mixed solvents, physical chemistry (phase diagrams, solubility, diffusion) of binary and ternary systems in liquid metals (especially in mercury and the alkali metals).
Christian Ekberg is a Swedish Chemist who studied and made his academic career at Chalmers University of Technology, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Göteborg, with a Postdoc at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization, Lucas Heights, Australia. He has collaborated on IUPAC projects mainly in the Chemistry and Environment Division. Throughout his career he has studied and published several works in the area of solubility and related chemical equilibria, fundamentally in geological systems related to the chemistry of the actinoids. In later years he also specialised in industrial materials recycling, with several publications in this area. As a complement to his work on critical analysis of solubility data and other properties of materials, he has developed computer programs for uncertainty analysis, such as SENVAR: a code for handling chemical uncertainties in solubility calculations (1995), MINVAR and UNCCON, computer programs for uncertainty analysis of solubility calculations in geological systems (2000) or the effect of uncertainties in stability constants on speciation diagrams (2003). Together with Paul L. Brown he is the editor of the two volume publications on Hydrolysis of metal ions (2016). He is an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and the Royal Society for Arts and Sciences.
Christo Balarew Award
In 2024, the first year of the Christo Balarew Award for Outstanding Young Scientists was given to Märt Lõkov from the University of Tartu, Estonia. The Award was announced during the International Symposium on Solubility Phenomena and Related Equilibrium Processes (ISSP21), and where Märt gave an oral presentation titled “Relative pKa measurements in non-aqueous solvents”.
Märt Lõkov is an Estonian chemist, who studied and has worked at the University of Tartu, Institute of Chemistry, Estonia, in the group and under the guidance of Prof. Ivo Leito. His main field of research is the investigation of the acid – base properties of different types of compounds in non-aqueous solvents like acetonitrile, 1,2-dichloroethane, tetrahydrofuran or 1,2-difluorobenzene. He is responsible for expanding and complementing the acidity and basicity scales in acetonitrile and also building similar acidity and basicity scales in other solvents. He is now engaged in a large-scale re-evaluation and revision of pKa values of carboxylic acids in three non-aqueous solvents – acetonitrile, (methanesulfinyl)methane (dmso – dimethyl sulfoxide), N,N– dimethylmethanamide (dmf – N,N– dimethylformamide).
The Christo Balarew Award was established in 2023 by Christo Balarew, Bulgarian professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, Bulgaria and enthusiastic supporter of the Solubility Data Project and deeply involved in IUPAC activities. This award is administered by the Subcommittee on Solubility and Equilibrium Data of IUPAC, and will be given in an annual basis to recognize a promising young scientist working in solubility and/or chemical equilibria.
> Announcement published in Chem Int Apr 2025, vol. 47, no. 2, 2025, pp. 24-26. https://doi.org/10.1515/ci-2025-0206