Young Uppsala researchers receive awards from the Göran Gustafsson Foundation

The Göran Gustafsson Foundation consists of two foundations with different focuses, one of which awards prizes in medicine and engineering physics at Uppsala University, and in engineering physics at KTH. The major Göran Gustafsson Prize at UU/KTH consists of a research grant totalling SEK 3.75 million as of 2025, distributed over three years. The maximum age of the winners is 36 years.

This year, the three-year prize at UU goes to Leiting Zhang, who studies solid-phase batteries based on metallic Li anodes. His focus is on so-called operando methodology, especially spectroscopy and 3D X-ray tomography, as well as method development. In 2018, he did a double PhD in Chemistry at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and in Chemical Engineering at the Collège de France, Paris. After a postdoctoral position at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, he came to Uppsala University in 2021. In 2023, he became Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of Chemistry-Ångström.

The Göran Gustafsson Foundation also awards a small prize to younger researchers, which from 2025 consists of a one-off research grant of SEK 1.25 million. This year, the one-year prize at UU goes to Sunghan Kim and his project ‘Partial differential equations, especially obstacle problems and free boundary problems’. He received his PhD in mathematics from Seoul National University, South Korea, in 2019, and after a postdoctoral position at KTH, he came to Uppsala University in 2022.

Anneli Björkman