New $5,000 ASCB Kaluza Prize Supported by Beckman Coulter To Encourage Creative Graduate Student Research

BETHESDA, MD. AUGUST 27, 2013—A competition for a $5,000 prize to encourage excellence in research by a graduate student member of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) was announced today by ASCB President Don Cleveland, PhD. The ASCB Kaluza Prize supported by Beckman Coulter, Inc., an international biomedical devices manufacturer, is named for the German mathematician Theodor Kaluza (1885-1954), who is the namesake of Beckman Coulter’s flow cytometry software system. 

“The prize is part of a new partnership between ASCB and Beckman Coulter to support excellence in science,” said ASCB Executive Director Stefano Bertuzzi, PhD. “Both ASCB and Beckman Coulter recognize the challenging times that trainees in biomedical research face. We are both determined to do everything possible to keep from losing the next generation of scientists. Losing the wave of innovation that these young researchers would bring to science would be equivalent to robbing society of its future. The ASCB Kaluza Prize is a step in a thousand-mile journey that our two organizations want to make together to ensure that science training remains a top priority in the U.S.” 

The ASCB Kaluza Prize winner will receive the $5,000 award and will be honored at the 2013 ASCB Annual Meeting in New Orleans this December. The application deadline is September 30, 2013, through http://ascb.org/kaluza.cfm.

In keeping with guidelines from the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), in which ASCB and other leading scientific societies and publishers pledged to evaluate candidates on their actual research, the ASCB Kaluza Prize selection panel will look at the quality and significance of an applicant’s work and not at the impact factors of the journals where the results were published, according to Cleveland, who will chair the panel.

The competition is open to ASCB members (or member applicants) who are current graduate students or have graduated within two years at the time of application. Applicants must submit a one-page essay describing the significance of the research and their contribution to it plus a current CV in one combined PDF. Graduate students who are not ASCB members can join now for $42 at www.ascb.org. For more information on Beckman Coulter, Inc., visit www.beckmancoulter.com.