History of the prize

The Faculty of Science has been awarding yearly teaching prizes for outstanding teachers since 2000. Originally, for every bachelor’s programme, students from the educational committee selected a winner who received a prize of 500 euros for educational purposes. From 2007 onwards, this setup was changed. Like before, educational committees still select one teacher per programme, but now a jury is installed to choose one winner for the entire Faculty: our Teacher of the Year. 

The jury, comprising the chairpersons of the study associations and the assessor from the Faculty Board, assess each of the nominated lecturers. The students from the education committees advocate their nominee by giving a short presentation to the jury. In many instances, the asessments are a close call. In this case, the jury will attend one or more lecturers in order to reach a final decision.

Winners

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The award

The Leiden Science Young Talent Award is awarded yearly to a student who completed their bachelor’s degree with an excellent thesis.

Previous winners

History of the prize

The C.J. Kok Jury award has been awarded to over a hundred talented young scientists, many of whom continued to become very successful in their profession. 

Since 1971
In the very first year, 1971, the prize was won by Rob Schilperoort, who later became a professor of biochemistry in Leiden, and a pioneer in modern plant biology. 

In the early years, the C.J. Kok Jury Award was awarded alternately to researchers from the Leiden University Medical Center and the Faculty of Science.

Harbinger of success?
Up until 2003, the C.J. Kok Jury Award had multiple recipients. Many prize winners continued their careers at our Faculty of Science or eventually returned here. Others became professors at other universities.

Winners

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History of the prize

In addition to the existing C.J. Kok Jury Award for the best thesis, the annual C.J. Kok Public Award was also established in 2004. For the Public Award, each of the eight institutes affiliated with the Faculty of Science nominated one researcher who had made a significant discovery in their academic field that year. The winner of this prize was honoured as the ‘Discoverer of the Year’ for the following year. The C.J. Kok Public Awaes came with a cash award of 2,500 euros.

The Public Award was awarded based on the results of a public voting round. Internal votes, meaning votes from colleagues within the same institute, were weighted to correct for the size of the respective institute. In the last years, however, winners had also received a substantial number of votes from outside their own institute.

The C.J. Kok Public Award was last awarded in 2020.

Winners

The inheritance of Mr. C.J. Kok

The C.J. Kok fund was raised from the assets of Mr C.J. Kok, a biology tutor from The Hague, who was strongly committed to the natural sciences. Upon his death in 1965, he left his entire estate to Leiden University. The C.J. Kok fund was established with this inheritance.

In his will, Mr Kok estated that both the Faculty of Science and the Leiden University Medical Center would annually be given the opportunity to use the fund's revenues to award outstanding perfomance to those demonstrating ‘a pronounced, significant talent for mathematics or solving medical problems’. 

The will also states that the assessment of performance should be on purely scientific grounds and that ‘no distinction should be made regarding rank, status, race, national character, origin, relationship and so on’.