UNESCO honors Turkish scientist as 'rising talent'

By Onur Usta

PARIS (AA) - A Turkish female scientist won UNESCO’s International Rising Talent Award on Friday.

Bilge Demirkoz, a physicist at Ankara’s Middle East Technical University (ODTU), was given the honor for her work studying space radiation.

Isabel Marey Semper, executive vice president at the L’ORÉAL Foundation, gave the award to Demirkoz at a ceremony in Paris.

"I feel very honored to be awarded. And I am very happy to bring such an award to Turkey for the first time," Demirkoz, who has studied at MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, and CERN in Switzerland, said after the ceremony.

Describing her work, she said, "We are measuring high-energy particles in space and trying to crack the secrets of the universe by measuring the particles. One of these is very important: dark matter. We are also measuring the amount of radiation in space. We can calculate the amount of radiation that our satellites will get”.

For 19 years the International Rising Talents Award has been given annually by UNESCO to a female scientist.