Last year, the board of the Olga Igonkina Foundation decided to award the Olga Igonkina Scholarships 2024 to master’s students Anna Lewicki and Sergei Solokhin. The award was presented at the Nikhef New Year reception in January this year. Both researchers received €2,000 and will use the scholarship for an international exchange this year.
Anna Lewicki is a master student working on theoretical models of gravitational waves with UvA cosmologist Dr. Gianfranco Bertone. Anna has submitted a proposal to travel to IFCA in Santander to work together with Dr Bradley Kavanagh, who is an expert on her topic.
Sergei Solokhin is a master student working with UvA particle physicist Dr. Jory Sonneveld on the development of the next generation pixel detector for the ALICE experiment at CERN. Sergei has submitted a proposal to travel to CERN to perform tests of the chip with beam and X-rays.
The scholarship jury, consisting of Nikhef director Prof. Dr. Jorgen d’Hondt, Dr. Hella Snoek and Dr. Wouter Hulsbergen has selected these candidates based on their excellence and well-motivated travel plans.
The Olga Igonkina Foundation was founded in 2020 in memory of Prof. Dr. Olga Igonkina (1973-2019). Olga was a Russian-Dutch particle physicist at Nikhef. During her career she worked on experiments in Hamburg, Stanford and at CERN in Geneva. In her research she concentrated on so-called lepton-flavour-violating processes. Since 2015 she was professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen.
The primary mission of the foundation is to promote international exchange of young scientists. Every year the foundation provides a scholarship to a promising student in particle physics. The scholarship is intended for travel to a conference or scientific institute outside their home country. Interested students can apply for the scholarship by sending in a concrete travel plan. A jury consisting of senior physicists in the field selects a winner.