Mike Jetten Award
The KNVM will award three prizes for the best master theses in the field of microbiology in the broadest sense. The master thesis should describe research that is carried out by the student, so literature studies are outside the scope of this award. The candidates, students from Dutch universities or research institutes, are encouraged to submit their master thesis with a short recommendation from their supervisor. The three prizes are awarded during the KNVM/NVMM Scientific Spring Meeting. The jury consists of members of the KNVM board. Please send your submission to secretariaat@knvm.org (deadline January 15th for theses produced in the previous year).
This prize is named after Prof. Mike Jetten (Roermond 1962), a renowned Dutch microbiologist and a world leader in the field of environmental microbiology. He received several prestigious awards and prizes: ERC Advanced Grant in 2008 for his research on anammox bacteria, the Spinozapremie in 2012, and a second ERC Advanced grant in 2013 to study the ecology of methane oxidizers. Since 2013, he is the scientific director of the Gravitation consortium on anaerobic microbiology (Soehngen Institute of Anaerobic Microbiology, https://anaerobic-microbiology.eu/). He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences, the European Academy of Microbiology, EMBO and KNVM. In 2019 he was awarded an ERC Synergy grant together with Utrecht University. He has published more than 500 papers and he has supervised 60 PhD candidates and 36 post-docs on various topics in methane and nitrogen cycles. He has been an editor for AEM, Microbiology(UK), Archives of Microbiology, Environmental Microbiology, and is currently Editor in Chief of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek Journal of Microbiology, a joint venture between KNVM and SpringerNature (https://www.springer.com/journal/10482). In September 2015, his team started the first Microbiology master's education in the Netherlands from which currently more than 160 students from 42 countries have graduated.
Awardees
2024
Lotte Nijman (Radboud University)
NO-forming nitrite reductases in the anaerobic ammonium oxidizer Kuenenia stuttgartiensisDieuwertje de Bruin (Leiden University)
Elucidating reversible metamorphosis in filamentous actinobacteriaMilou Stevens (Radboud University)
Murine norovirus NS3 protein represses host protein translation and induces cell death in murine melanoma cell lines
2023
- Catherine Toner-Bartelds (Utrecht University)
Rapid methods for the assessment of bacterial killing by phage - Pleun Meurs (Radboud University Nijmegen)
The influence of different culture media on colonization factors of Streptococcus pneumoniae - Gerben de Zwaan (Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research)
Development and optimization of fluorescence-in situ hybridization tools to target microbial symbiotic systems