This year Renana Gershoni-Poranne was awarded a Branco Weiss Fellowship. The ETH chemist will use the research grant to design innovative compounds that can be used in future generations of electronic devices.
Renana Gershoni-Poranne’s office is very spacious and tidy, but also quite personal. Hanging on the wall near her desk are drawings made for her by her boys, aged five and nine. One of them is in the style of Picasso, while the other is a charming copy of van Gogh’s sunflowers. Next to them is a brightly coloured footprint from her youngest son. “I love my office,” says the 35-year-old chemist. She sits behind her large corner desk and carries on chatting about the many birthday and holiday cards from colleagues that are displayed on a shelf on the other side of the room. Gershoni-Poranne talks so quickly, it’s difficult to get a word in.
The specialist in physical organic chemistry is one of six researchers to receive a Branco Weiss Fellowship award this summer. The research funding, worth half a million Swiss francs, gives the young researchers the opportunity to undertake ambitious and exceptional projects and to work on the topics they consider to be most important. Gershoni-Poranne’s project is also impressive: she wants to design novel organic compounds in order to equip electronic devices with improved, and perhaps also previously unimagined, functionalities.
Source: “A chemist and her children”, Santina Russo, Zurich ETH
