Linnaeus and Rudbeck Medal recipients announced

Uppsala University’s Linnaeus Medal was first awarded on the tercentenary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus on 23 May 2007. The gold medal is conferred “for truly outstanding scientific achievement, especially in the Linnaean subject areas or fields associated with the legacy of Linnaeus”.

In 2025, the Linnaeus Medal is being awarded to Professor Terry Hartig. The award citation reads:

Terry Hartig, Professor of Environmental Psychology, especially living environment issues, at the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research, has studied restorative environments. Drawing on environmental psychology, social ecology and social epidemiology, his research sheds light on the importance of living, working, institutional and leisure environments for people’s ability to recover from stress and psychological vulnerability. His research has answered fundamental questions about the processes and mechanisms of individual and collective recovery. In a long and close cooperation with the Linnaean Gardens, in his research and teaching he has shown a particular interest in these gardens as restorative environments.

Three researchers awarded Rudbeck Medal

Uppsala University’s Rudbeck Medal was first awarded in 2003. The medal was instituted the previous year on the occasion of the tercentenary of the death of Olof Rudbeck the Elder. It is awarded “for extraordinarily prominent achievements in science, to be conferred primarily for such accomplishments or findings attained at Uppsala University.”

In 2025, the Rudbeck Medal is being awarded to Professors Hans Kronning, Kerstin Lindblad-Toh and Andreas Strömbergsson. The award citations are as follows:

Hans Kronning is Emeritus Professor of Romance Languages, especially French, at the Department of Modern Languages. His research has been concerned with several key aspects of linguistics, but he has devoted particular interest to problems at the intersection of grammar, semantics and pragmatics. Based on empirical data from the Romance languages, he has thus been able to make a significant contribution to our understanding of humans as linguistic beings – both synchronically and diachronically.

Kerstin Lindblad-Toh is Professor of Comparative Genomics at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Microbiology and she is also affiliated with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, USA. She has led and coordinated around ten genome sequencing projects for vertebrates such as dogs, opossums and horses, and participated in the coordination of the Zoonomia Project, which generated the genome sequence for more than two hundred mammals. Her notable achievements include establishing the dog as an animal model for human medicine.

Andreas Strömbergsson is Professor of Mathematics at the Department of Mathematics. He is honoured for his scientific work on homogeneous dynamics. This research area studies dynamical systems on homogeneous spaces, which are spaces endowed with special symmetries from a group action. His research concerns problems that have applications in classical number theory in particular, but also in mathematical physics. One example is his findings on the Boltzmann-Grad limit for periodic Lorentz gases, where he used probabilistic methods to answer classical questions about the dynamics and behaviour of the particles in the mathematical model for gases formulated by Hendrik Lorentz in 1905.

Annica Hulth