The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) is a
merit-based science academy established for developing countries, uniting 1,000 scientists in some 70 countries. Its principal aim is to promote scientific capacity and excellence for
sustainable development
Sustainable development is an organizing principle for meeting human development goals while also sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services on which the economy and society depend. The des ...
in
developing countries
A developing country is a sovereign state with a lesser developed industrial base and a lower Human Development Index (HDI) relative to other countries. However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. There is also no clear agreem ...
. It was formerly known as the ''Third World Academy of Sciences''. Its headquarters is located on the premises of the
Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) is an international research institute for physical and mathematical sciences that operates under a tripartite agreement between the Italian Government, United Nations Education ...
(
ICTP
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) is an international research institute for physical and mathematical sciences that operates under a tripartite agreement between the Italian Government, United Nations Education ...
) in
Trieste
Trieste ( , ; sl, Trst ; german: Triest ) is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is the capital city, and largest city, of the autonomous region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, one of two autonomous regions which are not subdivided into provi ...
, Italy.
History
TWAS was founded in 1983 under the leadership of the
Nobel Laureate
The Nobel Prizes ( sv, Nobelpriset, no, Nobelprisen) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make out ...
Abdus Salam
Mohammad Abdus Salam Salam adopted the forename "Mohammad" in 1974 in response to the anti-Ahmadiyya decrees in Pakistan, similarly he grew his beard. (; ; 29 January 192621 November 1996) was a Punjabi Pakistani theoretical physicist and a ...
of
Pakistan
Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 24 ...
by a group of distinguished scientists who were determined to do something about the dismal state of scientific research in
developing countries
A developing country is a sovereign state with a lesser developed industrial base and a lower Human Development Index (HDI) relative to other countries. However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. There is also no clear agreem ...
.
* Although developing countries account for 80% of the world's population, only 28% of the world's scientists hail from these countries. This fact reflects the lack of innovative potential necessary to solve real-life problems affecting poor nations.
* A chronic lack of funds for research often forces scientists in developing countries into intellectual isolation, jeopardizing their careers, their institutions and, ultimately, their nations.
* Scientists in developing countries tend to be poorly paid and gain little respect for their work because the role that scientific research can play in development efforts is underestimated. This in turn leads to
brain drain in favour of
the North that further impoverishes the South.
* Research institutions and universities in the South are under-funded, forcing scientists to work in difficult conditions and often with outdated equipment.
The founding members of TWAS therefore decided to set up an organization that would help to:
# Recognize, support and promote excellence in scientific research in the South;
# Provide promising scientists in the South with research facilities necessary for the advancement of their work;
# Facilitate contacts between individual scientists and institutions in the South;
# Encourage South–North cooperation between individuals and centres of scholarship;
# Promote scientific research on major
developing countries
A developing country is a sovereign state with a lesser developed industrial base and a lower Human Development Index (HDI) relative to other countries. However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. There is also no clear agreem ...
problems.
Since its inception, TWAS's operational expenses have largely been covered by generous contributions of the Italian government; since 1991
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...
has been responsible for the administration of TWAS finance and staff on the basis of an agreement signed by the director general of UNESCO and the president of TWAS.
It was named "Third World Academy of Sciences" until 2004 and "TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world" before September 2012,
when it was renamed to is current name, "The World Academy of Sciences for the advancement of science in developing countries".
Founding fellows
The founding fellows of 1983 include
*
Hua Luogeng
Hua Luogeng or Hua Loo-Keng (; 12 November 1910 – 12 June 1985) was a Chinese mathematician and politician famous for his important contributions to number theory and for his role as the leader of mathematics research and education in the Peop ...
(1910–1985),
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
*
Nil Ratan Dhar
Nil Ratan Dhar (2 January 1892 – 5 December 1986) was an Indian professor of soil science and chemistry at the University of Allahabad, known for discovering thermal and photo-chemical fixation of atmospheric nitrogen in the soil. He was the b ...
(1892–1987),
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
*
Luis F. Leloir (1906–1987),
Argentina
Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...
*
Benjamin Peary Pal
Benjamin Peary Pal or B. P. Pal FRS (26 May 1906 – 14 September 1989) was an Indian plant breeder and agronomist who served as a director of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi and as the first Director General of the Indian C ...
(1906–1989), India
*
Ignacio Bernal
Ignacio Bernal (February 13, 1910 in Paris - January 24, 1992 in Mexico City) was an eminent Mexican anthropologist and archaeologist.
Bernal excavated much of Monte Albán, originally starting as a student of Alfonso Caso, and later led major ar ...
(1910–1992),
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
*
Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff
Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (6 March 1912 – 17 May 1994) was an Austrian anthropologist and archaeologist. He is known for his fieldwork among many different Amerindian cultures such as in the Amazonian tropical rainforests (e.g. Desana Tucano) ...
(1912–1994),
Colombia
Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...
*
Emilio Rosenblueth
Emilio Rosenblueth Deutsch (1926–1994) was a Mexican engineer who devoted himself to the research of seismic events, and in particular to study the behavior of buildings against earthquakes and other seismic activity.
Born in Mexico City, Ro ...
(1926–1994), Mexico
*
Salimuzzaman Siddiqui
Salimuzzaman Siddiqui, ( ur, ; 19 October 1897 – 14 April 1994) was a Pakistani Muhajir organic chemist specialising in natural products, and a professor of chemistry at the University of Karachi.
Siddiqui studied philosophy at Aligarh Mus ...
(1897–1994),
Pakistan
Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 24 ...
*
Abdus Salam
Mohammad Abdus Salam Salam adopted the forename "Mohammad" in 1974 in response to the anti-Ahmadiyya decrees in Pakistan, similarly he grew his beard. (; ; 29 January 192621 November 1996) was a Punjabi Pakistani theoretical physicist and a ...
(1926–1996), Pakistan
*
Carlos Chagas Filho
Carlos Chagas Filho (September 10, 1910 – February 16, 2000) was a Brazilian physician, biologist and scientist active in the field of neuroscience. He was internationally renowned for his investigations on the neural mechanisms underlying ...
(1910–2000),
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
*
Johanna Döbereiner
Johanna Liesbeth Kubelka Döbereiner (28 November 1924 – 5 October 2000) was a Brazilian agronomist.
Biography
Döbereiner was born in Ústí nad Labem, Czechoslovakia on the 28 November 1924. Her family were German Czechoslovakians from Auss ...
(1924–2000), Brazil
*
Gopalasamudram Narayana Ramachandran
Gopalasamudram Narayanan Ramachandran, or G.N. Ramachandran, FRS (8 October 1922 – 7 April 2001) was an Indian physicist who was known for his work that led to his creation of the Ramachandran plot for understanding peptide structure. He wa ...
(1922–2001), India
*
Thomas Risley Odhiambo
Professor Thomas Risley Odhiambo (February 4, 1931 – May 26, 2003) was a Kenyan entomologist and environmental activist who directed research and scientific development in Africa.
Life and education
Odhiambo was educated at Maseno School in Ken ...
(1931–2003),
Kenya
)
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*
Marcel Roche
Marcel Roche Dugand (August 15, 1920 in Caracas, Venezuela – May 3, 2003 in Miami, USA) was a physician, scientist and scientific leader.
He was born into a wealthy family of French origin. His father, Luis Roche was a well known urbanist. ...
(1920–2003),
Venezuela
Venezuela (; ), officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela ( es, link=no, República Bolivariana de Venezuela), is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many islands and islets in th ...
*
Sivaramakrishna Chandrasekhar
Sivaramakrishna Chandrasekhar FNA, FRS (6 August 1930 – 8 March 2004) was an Indian physicist who won the Royal Medal in 1994. He was the founder-president of the International Liquid Crystal Society.
Chandrasekhar was born on 6 August 1 ...
(1930–2004), India
*
Thomas Adeoye Lambo (1923–2004),
Nigeria
Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...
*
Autar Singh Paintal
Autar Singh Paintal (24 September 1925 – 21 December 2004) was a medical scientist who made pioneering discoveries in the area of neurosciences and respiratory sciences. He is the first Indian Physiologist to become the Fellow of the Royal ...
(1925–2004), India
*
Hélio Gelli Pereira (1918–1994), Brazil, United Kingdom
*
Khem Singh Gill
Khem Singh Gill (1 September 1930 – 17 September 2019) was an Indian academic, geneticist, plant breeder and Vice-Chancellor of the Punjab Agricultural University. He was known for his contributions to the Green Revolution in India. Instrumen ...
(1930–2019), India
*
Ricardo Bressani
Cesar Ricardo Bressani Castignoli (28 September 1926 – 30 January 2015) was a Guatemalan food scientist. Born in Guatemala City, he received a bachelor of science in chemical engineering degree from the University of Dayton in 1948. In 1951, ...
Castignoli (1926–2015), Guatemala
*
Daniel Adzei Bekoe
Daniel Adzei Bekoe (7 December 1928 - 5 September 2020) was a Ghanaian chemist and academic. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana and also a former president of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Early life and education
Dani ...
(1928–2020),
Ghana
Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and To ...
*
Albert Rakoto Ratsimamanga
Albert Rakoto Ratsimamanga (28 December 1907 – 16 September 2001) was a Malagasy physician, biochemist and diplomat. Born into a disgraced royal family; Ratsimamanga trained as a doctor of exotic medicine in French Madagascar and France, where ...
(1907-2001), Madagascar
*
Félix Malu wa Kalenga
Félix Malu wa Kalenga (September 22, 1936 — April 22, 2011) was a Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congolese emeritus professor of Nuclear physics, Nuclear Physics and a scientist. He was a founding member of the The World Academy ...
(1936-2011), Democratic Republic of Congo
*
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (; ) (19 October 1910 – 21 August 1995) was an Indian-American theoretical physicist who spent his professional life in the United States. He shared the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics with William A. Fowler for "... ...
(1909-1995), India, USA
*
C.R. Rao
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao FRS (born 10 September 1920), commonly known as C. R. Rao, is an Indian-American mathematician and statistician. He is currently professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor at the Un ...
(b. 1920), India, USA
*
Shiing-Shen Chern
Shiing-Shen Chern (; , ; October 28, 1911 – December 3, 2004) was a Chinese-American mathematician and poet. He made fundamental contributions to differential geometry and topology. He has been called the "father of modern differential geome ...
(1911-2004), China, USA
*
C.N.R. Rao (b.1934), India
*
Sir Michael Atiyah
Sir Michael Francis Atiyah (; 22 April 1929 – 11 January 2019) was a British-Lebanese mathematician specialising in geometry. His contributions include the Atiyah–Singer index theorem and co-founding topological K-theory. He was awarded th ...
(1929-2019), United Kingdom, Lebanon
*
Baruj Benacerraf
Baruj Benacerraf (; October 29, 1920 – August 2, 2011) was a Venezuelan-American immunologist, who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the "discovery of the major histocompatibility complex genes which encode cell s ...
(1920-2011), Venezuela, USA
*
Humberto Fernández-Morán
Humberto Fernández-Morán Villalobos (February 18, 1924 March 17, 1999) was a Venezuelan research scientist born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, known for inventing the diamond knife or scalpel, significantly advancing the development of electromagne ...
(1924-1999), Venezuela, Sweden
*
Ali Javan
Ali Javan ( fa, علی جوان, Ali Javān; December 26, 1926 – September 12, 2016) was an Iranian-American physicist and inventor. He was the first to propose the concept of the gas laser in 1959 at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. A successf ...
(1926-2016), Iran, USA
*
Har Gobind Khorana
Har Gobind Khorana (9 January 1922 – 9 November 2011) was an Indian American biochemist. While on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and ...
(1922-2011), India, USA
*
M. G. K. Menon
Mambillikalathil Govind Kumar Menon (28 August 1928 – 22 November 2016) also known as M. G. K. Menon, was a physicist and policy maker from India. He had a prominent role in the development of science and technology in India over four ...
(1928-2016), India
*
Ricardo Miledi
Ricardo Miledi (15 September 1927 – 18 December 2017) was a Mexican neuroscientist known for his work deciphering the role of calcium in neurotransmitter release. He also helped to develop a technique for studying native receptors in frog oocyte ...
(1927-2017), Mexico
*
César Milstein
César Milstein, CH, FRS (8 October 1927 – 24 March 2002) was an Argentine biochemist in the field of antibody research. Milstein shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 with Niels Kaj Jerne and Georges J. F. Köhler for d ...
(1927-2004), Argentina, United Kingdom
*
M.S. Swaminathan
Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan (born 7 August 1925) is an Indian agronomist, agricultural scientist, plant geneticist, administrator and Humanitarianism, humanitarian. Swaminathan is a global leader of the Green Revolution, green revolution. H ...
(b. 1925), India
*
Yang Chen-Ning
Yang Chen-Ning or Chen-Ning Yang (; born 1 October 1922), also known as C. N. Yang or by the English name Frank Yang, is a Chinese theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to statistical mechanics, integrable systems, gauge th ...
(b. 1922), China, USA
*
Crodowaldo Pavan
Crodowaldo Pavan (; December 1, 1919 – April 3, 2009) was a Brazilian biologist and geneticist, and a scientific leader in Brazil.
Early life
Pavan was born to a family of second-generation immigrants from Italy in 1919, in the city of Campi ...
(1919-2009), Brazil
*
Tsung-Dao Lee
Tsung-Dao Lee (; born November 24, 1926) is a Chinese-American physicist, known for his work on parity violation, the Lee–Yang theorem, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion (RHIC) physics, nontopological solitons, and soliton star ...
(b. 1926), China, USA
*
Devendra Lal
Devendra Lal FRS (14 February 1929 – 1 December 2012) was an Indian geophysicist.
Life
He was born in Varanasi, India.
He graduated from Banaras Hindu University.
He graduated from Bombay University; his thesis was on cosmic ray physics; ...
(1929-2012), India, USA
*
Muhammad Akhtar (b. 1933), Pakistan, United Kingdom
*
Samuel C.C. Ting
Samuel Chao Chung Ting (, born January 27, 1936) is a Chinese-American physicist who, with Burton Richter, received the Nobel Prize in 1976 for discovering the Subatomic particle, subatomic J/ψ particle. More recently he has been the principal ...
(b. 1936), China, USA
*
Héctor Croxatto
Héctor Croxatto Rezzio (3 July 1908—28 September 2010) was a Chilean physiologist. He won the Chilean National Prize for Sciences in 1979. He was a Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Raised in Temuco, he studied medicine at the Uni ...
(1908-2010), Chile
TWAS Prize
The TWAS Prize is an annual award instituted in 1985 by TWAS to recognize excellence in scientific research in the
global South
The concept of Global North and Global South (or North–South divide in a global context) is used to describe a grouping of countries along socio-economic and political characteristics. The Global South is a term often used to identify region ...
.
At inception, the award was titled ''TWAS Awards in Basic Sciences'' and was awarded in Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Mathematics categories but was merged with the ''TWNSO (Third World Network of Scientific Organizations) Prizes in Applied Sciences'' in 2003 to form the present-day TWAS Prize, which is awarded in nine categories viz. Agricultural Sciences, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Engineering Sciences, Mathematics, Medical Sciences, Physics and Social Sciences.
The award carries a plaque and a cash prize of 15000
and is open to scientists living and working in a developing country.
See also
*
Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World
The Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD) is an international organisation that provides research training, career development and networking opportunities for women scientists throughout the developing world at diffe ...
References
External links
*
TWAS official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:World Academy of Sciences, The
Members of the International Council for Science
1983 establishments in Italy
Academies of sciences
Trieste
Scientific organizations established in 1983
Members of the International Science Council