08.03.18 – Professor Majed Chergui is one of the five laureates of the 2018 Khwarizmi International Award.The Khwarizmi International Award (KIA) was established in 1987 in memory of Abu Jafar Muhammad Ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi (ca. 780-850 AD), the famous Iranian mathematician, astronomer, and geographer whose name (latinized into Algoritmi) gave us the term “algorithm”.

The KIA is given annually by the Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology (IROST), which is affiliated with Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research and Technology. Originally intended to recognize outstanding achievements in science and technology by Iranian citizens, by 1997 the KIA expanded its scope to also include foreign candidates.

Professor Chergui received the KIA 2018 in the category of Fundamental Research under the title “Unravelling the fundamentals of solar materials”. An internationally renowned expert in ultrafast spectroscopy, Professor Chergui directs EPFL’s Laboratory of Ultrafast Spectroscopy, which carries out ultrafast-UV and X-ray spectroscopy studies on chemical and biological systems. Chergui is also a founding Editor-in-chief of the journal Structural Dynamics, a flagship journal of the American Institute of Physics and the American Crystallographic Association. His lab is also part of the Lausanne Centre for Ultrafast Science (LACUS).