Humboldt Foundation awards anthropologist and cancer scientist for development-related research

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Georg Forster Research Award honours researchers from developing and transition countries who have earned international recognition for their research work and seek to solve development-related issues. The award winners are nominated by specialist colleagues from Germany and are invited to establish or expand collaborative projects with them. Valued at €60,000 each, the Georg Forster Research Awards are financed by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The award winners:

Guillermo Wilde is a senior researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and Professor of Anthropology and History at Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His research focuses on Jesuit missions in Latin America. Wilde has contributed to a better understanding of the cultural and political interaction between indigenous groups and Catholic missionaries. He was one of the first historians to show that indigenous converts actively participated in the change of territoriality and in driving new perceptions of identity. With this work, he showed that evangelization did not proceed solely from European missionaries but was a significantly more complex process. In his publications and academic communication, Wilde advocates dispelling national historical perspectives. He will use his Georg Forster Research Award to collaborate with colleagues at FernUniversität in Hagen and examine, amongst other things, how German institutions deal with colonial heritage. This will particularly involve assessing the colonial heritage in the city of Hagen, in Westfalia-Lippe and in the Rhineland.

Nousheen Zaidi is a professor and director of the Cancer Research Centre at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan. She is the first Georg Forster Research Award winner from Pakistan. The biochemist conducts research into the molecular causes of cancer. She examines how cancer cells reprogramme their fat and energy metabolism to allow them to grow uncontrolled. She additionally supports public health issues with the aim of meshing science, health and environmental awareness in Pakistan more closely with one another. As a disseminator, she works together with public organisations to raise awareness of drinking water quality, environmental risks, myths about diseases, and access to health care. During her research stay in Germany, she will work together with colleagues at the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM) in Berlin and conduct projects to examine fat metabolism of cancer cells, investigate transformation products and conduct water analyses.

This research award is named after the naturalist, travel writer and journalist Georg Forster (1754–1794), a friend of Alexander von Humboldt.

Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enables more than 2,000 researchers from all over the world to spend time conducting research in Germany. The Foundation maintains an interdisciplinary network of well over 30,000 Humboldtians in more than 140 countries around the world – including 63 Nobel Prize winners.