Łukasiewicz – PORT in the Science Platform

Scientists operating at the Łukasiewicz – PORT are the characters of three films made as part of the Science Platform program. Róża Szweda, Ph.D., and Tomasz Prószyński, Ph.D., talks about their researches and scientific paths.

Research works and achievements of scientists operating in Łukasiewcz – PORT – Róża Szweda, Ph.D., and Tomasz Prószyński, Ph.D., became the subject of three recordings made as part of the Science Platform program. It is the first educational platform with video recordings in our country addressed to the general public. The program’s initiator is the Alegoria Foundation. Its realization was co-financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

Science Platform contains over 60 films about the history and the present day of Polish science, famous inventions and discoveries, and outstanding Polish scientists. Thanks to their popular-scientific nature, films are accessible and attractive to people who have not been interested in the subject of science or have had no access to it so far.

One can find six thematic blocks: Documentaries, Polish Talents, Polish Research, What’s Up in Science, What is It, MadeInPoland, and the History of Polish Science. Łukasiewicz – PORT appears in two of them. In the “Polish Talents” series, Róża Szweda, Ph.D., and Tomasz Prószyński, Ph.D., talk about their researches and scientific paths. One of the films in the “Polish Research” series is devoted to research carried out at our Institute by the Synaptogenesis Group led by T. Prószyński, Ph.D.

Szweda, Ph.D., and Prószyński, Ph.D., lead their research teams in the Łukasiewicz – PORT. They connected their scientific career with the Łukasiewicz Institute in Wrocław after returning from foreign internships and scholarships at prestigious research centers.

Róża Szweda, Ph.D., leads the Functional Macromolecules Research Team at the Łukasiewicz – PORT Material Science & Engineering Center. The subject of its research is polymers with a defined sequence of monomers and the possibility of their use, e.g., for long-term data storage. It is one of only a few research teams in the world dealing with this field. Before joining Łukasiewicz-PORT in 2019, she was working as post-doc and project manager at the Charles Sardon CNRS and Supramolecular Science and Engineering Institute at the University of Strasbourg.

Tomasz Prószyński, Ph.D., is the Principal Investigator of the Synaptogenesis Group at the Life Sciences & Biotechnology Center. His laboratory aims to understand mechanisms that regulate the organization of synapses in the central and peripheral nervous systems. Before starting cooperation with Łukasiewcz – PORT, he defended his doctoral thesis at the Max-Planck Institute in Dresden, and he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard University. After returning to Poland, he ran his own laboratory at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and in 2020 he started cooperation with Łukasiewicz – PORT. The publications of his team in Łukasiewicz – PORT received the 2020 Konorski Prize awarded by the Polish Society for the Study of the Nervous System and the Committee of Neurobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences for the best Polish research work in the field of neurobiology.

All recordings made as part of the program are available at https://platformanauki.pl/.