58 The Israel Chemist and Chemical Engineer Issue 9 · January 2023 · Tevet 5783 Report through their volatile metabolites constitutes the basis for another startup company in the process of fundraising. Raz has been awarded numerous grants focused on his applied science work, including three Kamin projects on transparent electrode technology, porous Au/graphene oxide systems for supercapacitor applications and a new electronic nose technology. His Ministry of Energy grant focuses on energy storage in server farms. A Nofar project focuses on polydiacetylene-based water pollution sensing, a Magnet project on pharmaceutical screening, a BARD grant on polydiacetylene-based detection of bacteria in agricultural products, and a Horizon 2020 grant on gas sensing of hazardous materials in containers. The 2021 ICS-Shahar Prize for the Excellent Administrative Assistant was awarded to Ms. Sarah Amzallag, personal assistant to the Dean of the Faculty of Chemistry, the Weizmann Institute of Science. She will receive the prize for her remarkable professional and creative management, work ethics, human relations, and outstanding organizational skills manifested by voluntarily expanding her contributions beyond the formally expected. The prize is in memory of the late Amir Shahar, contributed by Bioanalytics Ltd. Sarah was born in 1973 in Zurich to a German mother and half Italian/Swiss father. She finished high school in Bern, Switzerland (1994) and started her academic studies in Sociology and History at the University of Zurich. In 1996, Sarah made aliya to Israel and obtained her BA in Sociology and Political Sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She worked as an assistant to the deputy VP of the Department of International Relations in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. She also translated various freelance texts from German to English/Hebrew and vice versa (19992022). Following a short period as a marketing secretary at AccuBeat Ltd., Sarah worked for the JDC Israel – The Joint (2003), first as assistant to the Delegations’ Unit in the Department of International Relations, later at the Archive of the organization for microfilms research, and finally as the personal assistant to the Head of Relations in India and Donors in Europe. From 2006-2010 Sarah and her family moved to Zurich for five years, where she served as the personal assistant to the Head of the Institute of Pathology, University Hospital Zurich. In 2011, the family (3 children) moved back to Israel, settled in Givat Brenner, and she started working at the Weizmann Institute, first as the secretary of the Department of Structural Biology, and since 2014 as the Administrative Assistant of the Dean of the Faculty of Chemistry. The departmental head, previous and current Deans, all claim that she actually works as a director of the office, a personal rational selection of monomers, building blocks, solvents, reaction conditions, etc. His group has utilized polymeric carbon nitrides and their derivatives as photocatalysts and active material in photoanodes in photo-electrochemical cells. They have developed methods to manipulate the growth of carbon nitride layers on transparent conductive substrates by an intelligent design of the monomers, thus overcoming a crucial bottleneck in the area. They also overcame problems of insufficient light-harvesting, slow water oxidation kinetics, and instability of the photoactive layer. As a result, they achieved state-of-the-art carbon nitride-based PEC cells with efficient, long-term oxygen and hydrogen production. The 2021 ICS-Adama Prize for Technological Innovation was awarded to Prof. Raz Jelinek of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev for implementing conjugated chromatic polymers as color sensors, and for using carbon quantum dots and nanoscale gold assemblies for biological imaging, and electro-optic devices. Raz Jelinek was born in Beer Sheva, Israel (1964), obtained his BSc (summa cum laude, 1988) from the HebrewUniversity, and PhD (1988-1993) from the University of California, Berkeley, under Alexander Pines, working on “Double Rotation NMR Studies of Zeolites and Aluminophosphate Molecular Sieves.” After postdoc research (1993-1996) at the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the Department of Chemistry at Ben-Gurion University. From 2005 to 2007 he served as the Department Chairman, and currently, he is Vice-President and Dean for Research & Development of BGU. He is the incumbent of the Carole and Barry Kaye Chair in Applied Science, has published over 220 research papers (h-index 49), 15 patents, and 6 books. Raz is a world leader in the field of conjugated chromatic polymers, such as polydiacetylenes, which his group has implemented as color sensors for water pollutants, volatile organic compounds, proteins, and other biological molecules, as well as mechanical sensing of soft polymers. He is also a leader in the rapidly expanding carbon quantum dots (C-dots) field. He has demonstrated their utilization as biological and chemical sensors, cell imaging agents, bacterial detection, and membrane interactions screening biomolecules. In addition, Raz has worked on self-assembled organized nanoscale gold assemblies, and patented technology was implemented for fabricating various electro-optic devices, including transparent electrodes, antennas, supercapacitors, and physiological pressure sensors. His recent technology allows identifying therapeutic molecules in probiotic fermented microbiota, exhibiting remarkable anti-inflammatory properties. The technology has been translated to a startup company, which has raised a $3.5M investment from a prominent VC fund. Another technology employing C-dotbased capacitive e-nose for contactless bacterial detection
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