Dr Chiara Favaretto wins the ENS High Scientific Council PhD Award 2024

The ENS High Scientific Council brings together 25 scientists from 19 countries. For the 2024 edition of the ENS HSC PhD Award, the Council received twelve nominations from ENS member Societies: namely the Belgian, Bulgarian, Czech, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swiss, UK and Ukrainian Nuclear Societies.

ENS Members Societies provided candidates’ CVs, an extended summary of her/his PhD work, related articles and patents she/he co-authored, and a recommendation letter from her/his national society to the ENS secretariat.

Having examined all this information, the HSC met in Brussels on April 15-16 and, due to the very high level of the applications, exceptionally decided to select five out of these 12 candidates to enter the final stage of the contest:

  • Dr Chiara Favaretto (Switzerland) “Development of terbium radioisotopes towards clinical theragnostics applications in nuclear medicine”
  • Dr Nicolò Abrate (Italy) “Methods for safety and stability analysis of nuclear systems”
  • Dr Manon Delarue (France) “Development of a characterization method for concrete radioactive waste packages using photofission”
  • Dr Boglárka Babcsány (Hungary) “Development of a finite-element-based reactor physics code system for the solution of the SP3 approximation of the neutron transport equation”
  • Dr Elizabeth Sharp (United Kingdom) “Development of an NDT method for pressure monitoring of special nuclear material containment”

On 5-6 November 2024, the ENS HSC invited the finalists for a technical tour to the SCK CEN site, in Mol (Belgium), where the group had the unique opportunity to visit the Belgian research reactor BR-2 and the labs for radiopharmaceuticals.

The audition took place at the ENS offices, and after a long debate, Chairman Eric Proust announced that Dr Chiara Favaretto received the ENS HSC PhD Award 2024 with a prize of 2000 euros. Four other competitors have received the Laureate title.

The Award ceremony in person will be organised at any possible conference in 2025.