A physics professor of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a JINR Scientific Council member Ana María Cetto Kramis has won the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science. On 13 November, an award ceremony took place at an event dedicated to the World Science Day for Peace and Development, which is celebrated annually on 10 November, at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

Ana María Cetto received the Kalinga Prize from Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences at UNESCO Lidia Brito in recognition of her efforts to make scientific knowledge more accessible to the masses.

Photos by UNESCO, Fabrice Gentile

Ana María Cetto Kramis made a decisive contribution to strengthening and expanding Mexico’s scientific cooperation with the Joint Institute, as well as strengthening academic exchange between Mexican organizations and JINR. She was a special guest at the 131st session of the JINR Scientific Council in March 2022. In the same year, the JINR Committee of Plenipotentiaries elected Ana María Cetto Kramis as a member of the Scientific Council. She participated in a number of meeting, at which ways of developing bilateral cooperation between JINR and Mexico were outlined. It resulted in a Joint Declaration of Intent signed at the 133rd session of the JINR Scientific Council between the National Council for Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT) and JINR. The declaration reflected plans of the parties to work together in the field of frontier, fundamental, and applied research. In 2023, Ana María Cetto Kramis was one of the first laureates of the OGANESSON Prize, established by an outstanding JINR scientist Academician Yuri Oganessian, for outstanding scientific works and great personal contribution to the strengthening of global scientific cooperation for peace and sustainable development.

Professor Cetto is the author of a book targeting the public entitled Light: in Nature and in the Laboratory (La Luz: en la Naturaleza y en el Laboratorio) which retraces the history of the study of light and optical theories through the ages. It has sold about 100 000 copies.

Determined to ensure that science reaches the greatest number, Ana María Cetto led the translation of outreach materials on different scientific topics into ten of her country’s indigenous languages, in her previous role as President of the Mexican Physical Society. Even now that her term of office has ended, the translations into other indigenous languages continue.

Ana María Cetto founded Latindex, a bibliographic information system, in the 1990s to promote open access to scientific knowledge. Today, she is President of the UNESCO Open Science Steering Committee and occupies the UNESCO Chair on Science Diplomacy and Heritage.

The Kalinga Prize was created by UNESCO in 1951, thanks to a donation by Patnaik Bijoyanand, the Founding President of the Kalinga Foundation Trust of India. The prize is awarded every two years and now sponsored by the Government of India. The laureate is selected by an international jury and receives $40,000 in prize money, plus a diploma and the UNESCO Albert Einstein Medal.