70 best high schoolers, students, and PhD candidates were awarded at the ceremony on December 21st.

KFU was represented by First Vice-Rector Riyaz Minzaripov and Vice-Rector for Engineering Nayil Kashapov.

The scholarship has been in place since 1994. This year, 5 students and 5 PhD candidates from KFU emerged victorious, with monthly payments of 20 thousand and 30 thousand rubles respectively for the next year.

In his greeting, Mayor Ilsur Metshin noted that this iteration of the contest saw the biggest number of applications. Over 200 young researchers submitted their works on municipal issues. He specifically mentioned Yekaterina Fishman, a KFU student who evaluated the current environmental conditions at the notorious Samosyrovo landfill. The Mayor thanked the winners and their mentors and teachers.

Ms. Fishman commented on her work, “When Samosyrovo was established, there were no environmental protection requirements in place. Everything that ends up at the landfill gets into the ground and water. That’s a huge environmental problem. Our objective is to monitor the situation and to propose ways to battle that. We wanted to attract attention to this matter. And it seems that we have been heard.”

Another laureate, Anastasiya Tikhonova, submitted her paper on gene therapy of Alzheimer’s disease. She said, “There are currently no effective treatments of Alzheimer’s. We try to use gene and cell technologies to create new therapies. The research has so far been conducted on animals.”