Selection committee prepares for nominations

Five new members have been added the eight-person International Selection Committee for the Eur 1 million Millennium Technology Prize.

The Board of the Millennium Technology Foundation has appointed five new members to the eight-person International Selection Committee for the Eur 1 million Millennium Technology Prize.

Every second year, the prize is awarded to a technological innovation that has the potential for a positive impact on quality of life while also supporting sustainable development.

"Once the theoretical basis for a technology has been established and the innovation is moving to the exploitation phase, it should conform to the requirements of sustainable development and the values and demands of society".

"The inventions made by the first two winners of the Millennium Technology Prize have already had a significant impact on people's living conditions worldwide", said Professor Marja Makarow, who now chairs the International Selection Committee.

The Millennium Technology Prize has been awarded twice, in 2004 to Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, and in 2006 to Professor Shuji Nakamura, for his revolutionary development of bright-blue, green and white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and a blue laser.

Applications that have been developed using Professor Shuji Nakamura's new sources of light clearly indicate that technological innovations have an important role in reducing global energy consumption, providing environmentally-friendly and energy-efficient lighting in developing countries, and in the more efficient sterilisation of drinking water.

The name of the winner of the third Millennium Technology Prize will be announced in June 2008.

The nomination period for the prize begins on 16th April 2007.

New members of the committee for 2007-08 are Dr Mikko Hupa, Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Technology at the Abo Akademi University in Turku (Finland); Dr Bob Iannucci, Senior Vice President and Head of Nokia Research centre (Finland); Dr Risto Nieminen, Academy Professor at Helsinki University of Technology and Director of Comp, a National Centre for Excellence in Computational Nanoscience (Finland); Dr VS Ramamurthy, Homi Bhabha Chair Professor at the Inter-University Accelerator Centre in New Delhi (India); and Dr Henry T Yang, Professor and Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA).

In addition to the committee's new chairperson, Dr Marja Makarow, Professor of Applied Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Vice-Rector of the University of Helsinki, members of the 2005-06 committee who will continue to serve are Dr Bengt Norden, Professor of Physical Chemistry at Chalmers University of Technology, and Dr Jean-Claude Charpentier, President of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering and Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

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