Pavel Jungwirth elected Corresponding Member of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature

The Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz has admitted five new members. Among them is Pavel Jungwirth, a physical chemist at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences, a member and, from 2020 to 2022, president of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic.

Just as the Learned Society traces its roots to the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences, the Mainz Academy (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz) continues the tradition of the Brandenburg Society of Sciences (Kurfürstliche Brandenburgische Sozietät der Wissenschaften), founded in 1700 by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. This lineage is also reflected in the academy’s seal motto, Genio Leibnitii (“In the spirit of Leibniz”).

The Academy is divided into three classes: (1) Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, (2) Humanities and Social Sciences, and (3) Literature and Music. Each class may have up to 50 full members and 50 corresponding members. The Academy also boasts several Nobel laureates among its ranks, including Niels Bohr, Otto Hahn, Konrad Lorenz, Halldór Laxness, Heinrich Böll, and Jean-Marie Lehn.

Pavel Jungwirth was elected a corresponding member of the Mathematics and Natural Sciences class. He is currently the principal investigator of an ERC Advanced Grant. In his Q-SCALING project, he is seeking to model ion behavior in biological environments (e.g., calcium ions in cardiac activity regulation) as accurately as possible. He hopes that the new method will help scientists worldwide and accelerate, for instance, the development of new drugs. "We are not making a discovery. We are creating a new and better tool for the correct description of ion-controlled biological processes," he explains.

Photo by Tomáš Belloň, IOCB CAS