International Prize Global Energy to Be Awarded in St.Petersburg

The ceremony of awarding the international prize Global Energy will be held in St. Petersburg in June, a RIA Novosti correspondent quotes Russian presidential aide Sergei Yastrzhembski as saying. On April 25 the names of the winners will be published, he added.

In turn, Nobel winner Zhores Alfyorov, vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, specified that the ceremony would be held on June 15, on eve of the St. Petersburg gathering of Nobel winners, Science and Human Progress.

Alfyorov voiced the hope that the Nobel winners would also participate in the awarding ceremony. Fifty applications have been filed by the expert commission to select five of them, he said.

The international committee including Russian academicians Zhores Alfyorov and Igor Makarov, Nobel winners Georg Bednorz of Switzerland and Arno Penzias of the United States and others, will select the winners.

The prize was established at the end of 2002 and is the first international individual prize in applied and basic science.

The Global Energy international prize will be awarded annually for advanced discoveries, developments and inventions in the field of energy and the power sector. Russian and foreign researchers can become its winners. The 2003 prize amounts to 900,000 US dollars.