Metin Sitti and his team finalists for the 2020 Cozzarelli Prize

Stuttgart – Metin Sitti, the Director of the Physical Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, and his colleagues Hamed Shahsavan, Amirreza Aghakhani, Hao Zeng, Yubing Guo, Zoey S. Davidson, and Arri Priimagi were finalists for the prestigious 2020 Cozzarelli Prize. Their Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) article “Bioinspired underwater locomotion of light-driven liquid crystal gels”, presented in this press article dubbed “Underwater Snail-o-Bot gets kick from light” came in second in the Class III Engineering and Applied Sciences category.

“We are honored to receive the finalist recognition for such a highly prestigious prize by becoming one of the top 12 papers out of over 3,600 research articles published in PNAS in 2020. This recognition testifies to the outstanding and high-impact scientific research in my group, at our institute, and across the Max Planck Society”, says Sitti.

The annual Cozzarelli Prize recognizes outstanding contributions to the scientific disciplines represented by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Winners and finalists are chosen among articles that appeared in the journal last year in the six broadly defined classes under which the NAS is organized. Additionally, the Editorial Board has recognized six papers – one in each class – as finalists for the 2020 Cozzarelli Prize.

The Prize acknowledges papers that reflect scientific excellence and originality. The award was established in 2005 as the Paper of the Year Prize and was renamed in 2007 to honor late PNAS Editor-in-Chief Nicholas R. Cozzarelli.

PNAS is one of the world's most-cited multidisciplinary scientific journals. It covers the biological, physical, and social sciences as well as mathematics. It publishes cutting-edge research reports, commentaries, reviews, perspectives, colloquium papers, and actions of the Academy. PNAS publishes daily online and in weekly issues.