The winners of the 2017 Kovalevskaia Award were announced by the Vietnam Women's Union on March 2, namely Ass. Prof. Tran Van Khanh, Head of the Molecular Pathology Department under the Hanoi Medical University’s Faculty of Medical Technology, cum Deputy Director of Gen-Protein Research Centre under the university; and Ass. Prof. Dinh Thi Bich Lan, Senior Lecturer under the Institute of Biotechnology of Hue University.
They were both honoured with the prestigious award for their outstanding achievements in scientific research.
Ass. Prof. Lan, born in 1960, is the author of many research projects to create high-tech products, such as recombinant antigens, fast diagnostic KITs (immersion sticks), recombinant vaccines, biological preparations containing antibodies from egg yolk and hybrid pigs. She has won noble prizes in science and technology in the central province of Thua Thien-Hue for many years.
Most of the research conducted by Lan has been transferred to the localities through projects on trial production and technology transfer. In the near future, the results of her research will be widely produced in the market.
Ass. Prof. Khanh is the youngest scientist to receive the prize in the history of the Kovalevskaia Award in Vietnam. The doctor, born in 1973, has gained a number of achievements in scientific research on gene therapy, prenatal diagnosis of a number of genetic diseases and gene carriers, and the pre-diagnosis of certain hereditary diseases or molecular pathology in cancer. She received a certificate of merit from the Prime Minister in 2015 and a lot of certificates of merit from the Ministry of Health.
To date, Khanh has carried out genetic diagnosis for over 1,000 patients and family members, detecting healthy people that were carrying the genetic diseases. With the results obtained, maps of the mutant genes of various diseases in Vietnamese patients have been published.
The Kovalevskaia Award 2017 ceremony will take place in Hanoi on March 6. Students will then hold a live exchange with the two female scientists shortly after the ceremony.
The award, named after the major Russian female mathematician Sophia Kovalevskaia, has been presented to female scientists in Vietnam in the field of natural sciences since 1985. So far, 17 collectives and 48 individuals have been awarded with the noble prize for their outstanding scientific achievements in the fields of mathematics, chemistry, biology, medicine and agriculture.
