Ekaterina Zhuravskaya and Vladimir Vapnik are the new George Gamow award laureates

G.A. Gamow award, established by the Russian-American Association of Scientists (RASA-America, Russian-American Science Association) in memory of the outstanding Russian-American physicist, Professor Georgy Antonovich Gamow (1904-1968) and to encourage members of the Russian-speaking scientific diaspora for outstanding achievements recognized by the wider scientific community, for 2024 is awarded to:

Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, professor of the Paris School of Economics “for research that has made significant contributions to understanding the functioning of institutions, including in transition economies, especially aspects related to political economy and media economics”.

Vladimir Vapnik

Vladimir Vapnik, professor of the Columbia University “for his fundamental contributions to statistical learning theory and, especially, development of a widely used approach known as Support Vector Machines that formed the foundation of modern data science” .

“It is a great honor for me to receive the George Gamow Award. The life and career of Gamow is a great inspiration for Russian-speaking academics from around the world who continue to push the boundaries of knowledge. His relentless curiosity and groundbreaking contributions to science serve as a reminder that science knows no borders. I thank the Russian-American Science Association and the Award Committee for recognizing my work and hope that this year’s Award will inspire new interdisciplinary research in social sciences”, said Ekaterina Zhuravskaya.

“I believe the George Gamow Prize is especially notable given the accomplishments of the scientific community it came to represent,” Prof. Vapnik added.

The award ceremony will take place at the annual conference of the RASA, which will take place on November 16-17, 2024 at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and will be dedicated to the 130th anniversary of the physicist and the Nobel Prize winner Pyotr Kapitsa. 

Ekaterina Zhuravskaya is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1999 and has since held various academic and advisory positions, specializing in political economics. Throughout her career, Zhuravskaya has made significant contributions to the understanding of how political institutions, media, and economic policies shape societies. Her research on the political effects of media, and more recently, social media, the origins of ethnic conflict, as well as historical economic development, corruption, and decentralization, has been widely recognized. She has earned numerous awards, such as the CNRS Silver Medal, the Birgit Grodal Award, and the Econometric Society Fellowship, recognizing her substantial contributions to social sciences. Zhuravskaya currently serves as a co-editor of the American Economic Review.

Vladimir Vapnik is a computer scientist, researcher, and academic. He is one of the main developers of the Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory of statistical learning and the co-inventor of the support-vector machine method and support-vector clustering algorithms. He gained his PhD and then worked at the Institute of Control Sciences in Moscow. In 1990 he moved to the US to join  AT&T Bell Labs. Later he was with NEC Laboratories, and lately with Facebook AI Research and Columbia University. As of February 1, 2021, he has an h-index of 86 and, overall, his publications have been cited 226597 times. He was inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2006 and received a number of international awards, including the Kolmogorov medal.

The RASA award has been established in 2015 in memory of Georgy Antonovich Gamow, an outstanding representative of the scientific diaspora, an influential Soviet and American theoretical physicist, astrophysicist and popularizer of science. Literary scholar Andrei Zorin and economist Viktor Chernozhukov are its 2023’s laureates.