Science communication rewarded

Boris Zernikow, a medical researcher at Witten/Herdecke University, has won the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’s (DFG) Communicator Prize for 2015.

Zernikow, who specialises in children’s and palliative medicine, was rewarded for his dedicated and diverse public engagement on the topics of pain, treatment and palliative care in children and adolescents. The prize is worth €50,000.

In its announcement, the DFG, Germany’s largest public research funder, said: “Zernikow communicates with the general public and media, individual target groups such as healthy and sick children and their families, and representatives of health policy and the health system. He sees himself as an ‘ambassador’ for the needs of severely and terminally ill children and young people, of which there are about 400,000 in Germany.”