New Oscar Prize winners announced

Uppsala University’s Oscar Prize for young researchers has been awarded to Eric Cullhed, Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Linguistics and Philology and Oskar Karlsson, Doctor of Pharmacy, Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences.

The Oscar Prize is awarded every year to young researchers at Uppsala University “whose scientific writing is the most deserving and offers the greatest promise of continued academic writings at the University”. The prize is funded through annual yields from King Oscar II’s anniversary donation and can be shared by two equally deserving researchers.

The recipients are selected by the University Board on the proposal of a committee composed of Faculty Deans. The prize will be presented at the Winter Conferment Ceremony in January.

Uppsala University’s Oscar Prize for young researchers has been awarded to Eric Cullhed, Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Linguistics and Philology and Oskar Karlsson, Doctor of Pharmacy, Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences.

Award citation, Doctor of Philosophy Eric Cullhed:
“In his doctoral dissertation (2014), Eric Cullhed presented, translated and analysed one of the most important medieval commentaries on the Homeric Hymns. Cullhed’s way of focusing on the emergence process and didactic function of the commentaries and their place in 12^th century intellectual culture in Constantinople has put a thousand-year-old research tradition onto a new track. The dissertation has already attracted major international attention and was published in a revised version in 2016. Following his doctoral dissertation, Cullhed has published extensively in Swedish, English and Spanish. He has also been a popular lecturer at international conferences and published a Swedish translation of Cicero’s letters (2017). His broad humanistic interests often take him beyond disciplinary boundaries and traditional frameworks, something which characterises his ongoing project on classical poetics and modern empirical aesthetics, particularly in relation to cognitive and affective neuroscience.”

Award citation, Doctor of Pharmacy Oskar Karlsson:
“Oskar Karlsson publicly defended his dissertation on a neurotoxin in 2011, in which he showed that neonatal exposure to this toxin can result in neurodegenerative changes in the adult brain. After receiving his PhD, Karlsson has worked a postdoc researcher at institutions such as Harvard University and Karolinska Institutet and is currently Associate Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University in the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences. Karlsson continues to take an interest in the significance of exposure to environmental contamination and pharmaceuticals during the neonatal period, but has also initiated new lines of research. One example of the latter is his studies of epigenetic changes caused by air pollution, which has attracted a great deal of attention. Karlsson’s research has been based on advanced instrumental analysis and he has established extensive collaborative ventures both in Sweden and abroad.”

Elin Bäckström