This year's winner of the Junior Prima Prize in Science is Susanne Prokop

Susanne joined the Molecular Neurobiology research group led by István Katona in 2016. 

But before we continue with the story, we need to clarify one thing. Susanne, who already came to KOKI with an excellent track record and a collection of awards, including the well-deserved Kuffler Scholarship, chose an excellent place in terms of several aspects and the best possible chances of winning the Junior Prima Prize.

The first prize was awarded in 2007 when KOKI was represented by Balázs Rózsa, and since then, together with Susanne, we have had 11 winners, a very good result. But even more remarkable is the distribution of the prizes! 

The winners in 2013 and 2016 are Gergely Katona and Gergely Szalay, who are teammates of Balázs Rózsa's group. The 11 winners include three girls in total. One might wonder about the ratio since the gender ratio in research is still quite even for PhD students, and young researchers under 33, but I think it is more remarkable that the three girls (Anikó Ludányi 2008, Zsófia László 2020) were members of the same group as Susanne, namely István Katona's team!  

But let's go back to 2016 when Susanne not only joined the Katona group but also the project that started at the end of 2015. István Katona wrote about it to his group:

"We had a simple basic idea, which seemed almost impossible at first. However, based on some very good chemists in the Bitter Group and some successful initial results from members of our group, Susanne has dedicated 5 years of her life to overcoming dozens of theoretical, methodological, and logistical obstacles and to proving that the method works by implementing the basic idea. It took a bundle of creative ideas, literature, and logistical support to solve each of the problems, large and small, to make the project a success. There were years when almost no progress was made, but Susanne never gave up. She did everything that a first author in charge of a pilot project should do. She read and reviewed the abundant literature, devised and tested solutions to the problems, and persevered to a successful conclusion.

Of course, you can't achieve that level of success today without a very dedicated team working together to achieve it. Susanne was not alone. Our entire creative team, chemists from the Institute of Natural Sciences, and our Dutch and Italian collaborators, all worked under her hand. Susanne's success is our success and a great credit to our whole group."

What was this joint project and why was it necessary for István Katona and György Keserű, member of Hung Acad Sci, and leader of the Medicinal Chemistry Group (HUN-REN RTK) to work together? Since the realization of that particular idea, a synthesis of pharmacological and anatomical thinking had to be applied, and only in this way could Susanne succeed in developing a new method called PharmacoSTORM, which allows the measurement of the binding site of drugs on the surface of nerve cells with nanometre precision. This method was the first to determine the mechanism of action of a drug of industrial history, Cariprazine, a Hungarian drug of historic importance. 

The results of a five-year series of experiments were published in Nature Communications in 2021, and Susanne's presentation of the PharmacoSTORM method won her the Best Young Investigator Presentation Award at the ERNEST 6th conference, a forum for signal transduction research. 

One more significant fact: The use of PharmacoSTORM and Susanne's observation has drawn attention to a little-known and little-researched brain area, the Calleja Islands, and has led to the start of studies on its role in the human brain and psychiatric diseases. 

It is also a "special prize" that the study has been selected as one of the top five basic research findings of 2021 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the NIH in the US.

The latest award is the Junior Prima Prize. 

While it is true, as Katalin Karikó has stressed on several occasions, that in research it is not the prizes that count, the role of these awards cannot be denied: they are necessary in many cases, or at least they help people to win grants for new ideas and research projects, because they convince the judges that it is worth giving another chance to someone who has already proven themselves. 

But instead of speculating, it is better to ask the winner about the award!

- I was of course delighted to receive the award, which is important to me for some reasons. I know previous winners, and all of them are young researchers whose work I admire. It is very uplifting to be one of them. It was a great honor in itself to receive the award in the main building of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in this beautiful building of special significance. I was particularly happy to do it in the company of my immediate family and friends. I get a lot of help from them every day, and so this award was also their success. Through the press, I have also reached many people who helped me in my career in the past, but nowadays I have much less opportunity to meet them. I am thinking, among others, of my former high school teachers. It was a very good feeling to see that they too shared the joy.
Although prizes or articles are never the main motivation for me in research, of course, every recognition and positive feedback is an important reinforcement and gives me the strength to overcome the small daily difficulties. 

- And I have to mention one more thing. I was particularly pleased that my lab mates and my current and former supervisors shared my joy and made me feel a sense of pride. I also think it is very important that the students who work in our lab see not only that we are doing very exciting things that lead to new results, but also that our environment appreciates our research.