2019 Academy Prize Laureates

Prof. Dr. F. Jamil Ragep and Prof. Dr. Adrian Bejan have received the 2019 “TÜBA International Academy Prizes”, which is established as part of TÜBA’s mission of encouraging and appreciating scientists and open to all scientists around the world.

TÜBA International Academy Prizes are given in three categories: Social and Humanities, Health and Life Sciences, and Science and Engineering Sciences. As a result of the evaluations of the referee committee, no awards were given in the field of Health and Life Sciences in this year. The scientists who were awarded by TÜBA Academy Council after national and international referee evaluations and TÜBA Academy Council:

In the Social and Humanities category; 2019 TÜBA International Prize was presented to McGill University Facult Member Prof. F. Jamil Ragep for his works that broadened the time and space horizons of the history of Islamic science, and especially for his researches on the ways in which Nasiruddin Tûsî, İbn Şâtır and Ali Kuşcu's astronomy studies were transferred to Europe in the pre-modern period and showed the effects of the emergence of Copernican astronomy.

In the category of Basic and Engineering Sciences; 2019 TÜBA International Prize was presented to Duke University Faculty Member Prof. Dr. Adrian Bejan for his remarkable number of creative works such as combining thermodynamics and heat transfer in the field of thermodynamics, developing design as a science that brings together all fields, and putting forth “Structural Theory”.

Prof. Dr. F. Jamil Ragep was born in West Virginia (USA), he attended the University of Michigan, where he received degrees in Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies, and later took a Ph.D. in the History of Science at Harvard University. He has written extensively on the history of science in Islam and has co-edited books on the transmission of science between cultures and on water resources in the Middle East. In association with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, he is co-directing a project to study the fifteenth-century background to the Copernican revolution and in particular its Islamic sources. Thanks to a major grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Quebec government, Ragep is leading an international Digital Humanities project to catalogue all Islamic manuscripts in the exact sciences and provide a means to access information online on the intellectual, institutional, and scientific contexts of these texts. This is part of a larger project, the Rational Sciences in Islam (RASI), that is in collaboration with Prof. Robert Wisnovsky’s Post-classical Islamic Philosophy Database Initiative (PIPDI), also centered at McGill.

Prof. Dr. Adrian Bejan received his bachelor's degree in 1971, his master's degree in 1972 and his doctorate in 1975 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2018 and the Humboldt Research Award in 2019 for his works on the structural law of thermodynamics and natural design and the evolution of nature, engineering, science and social systems. Bejan wrote more than 30 books and published articles in 650 peer-reviewed journals. Bejan received 18 honorary doctorate degrees from universities in 11 countries, from France to Azerbaijan, from Brazil to South Africa. Bejan’s most recent book, “Freedom and Evolution: Hierarchy in Nature, Society and Science” was prepared by Springer for publishing in 2020.