The Young Academy of Europe Prize is awarded annually to early to mid-career professionals in recognition of their outstanding achievements and contributions to key areas of the YAE. In 2019, the YAE Prize has been named “André Mischke YAE Prize for Science and Policy” in honour of the YAE Founding Chair, André Mischke. The prize is awarded to support and promote: science, evidence-based policy making, science communication, and future generation scientists and scholars in Europe.
Professor Renaud Jolivet is Full Professor at the Maastricht Centre for Systems Biology, and Chair of Neural Engineering & Computation at Maastricht University. He additionally holds a courtesy appointment at CERN, the particle physics laboratory. He is an elected member of the Board of Directors at the Organization for Computational Neurosciences, and the inaugural Chair of the Science & Technology Committee of EBRAINS, the European research infrastructure for neurosciences. In 2023, he is also a Neurotech Fellow at the Foresight Institute. He has worked in Switzerland, Japan, the Netherlands, and the UK. His work focusses on the brain’s heterocellularity and on neurotechnologies to interface with brain tissue.
Over the last decade, Prof. Jolivet has also been active in science policy at the European level, first within various working groups of the MCAA, before being elected to the board of the Association for one term (2018-2020). From there, he served as the MCAA representative on the board of the Initiative for Science in Europe (ISE), and as External Policy Advisor (2019-2022). This work has led to a number of policy documents published by MCAA and ISE (e.g. on research precarity) and to a number of policy workshops and sessions. Since January 2022, he is the representative for individual researchers and innovators at the European Commission’s ERA Forum, where he was nominated by ISE, MCAA, EuroDoc, EuroScience, and the Association of ERC Grantees. There, together with his colleague Prof. Dr. Agnieszka Wykowska, he brings the voice of researchers to the table where the future of European science policy is crafted.