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, or even outside of the faculty.

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

Winners of the C.J. Kok Public Award

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’.