Dear Colleagues, As you know, every year, with our awards, we aim to reward those scientists that have made exceptional contributions to the advance of sciences in different areas as well as the Leonardo da Vinci career prize, decerned to the one whose breakthrough contributions have benefitted the global science community. We expect to undertake this during our upcoming EURASC symposia that will take place by videoconference on 14th April, under the coordination of our fellow Daniel Scherman (who himself will be sending out a programme to all members very soon). Therefore the time has come to request proposals from each division for the Leonardo da Vinci award and the Blaise Pascal Medal, where criteria of excellence must be considered for proper analysis by the Presidium. To this end, we would expect your selection to be evidence based and science relevant, though without the requirement of awarding in all science areas. As you know, there is another organization calling itself the EU Academy of Sciences that uses the logo EUAS and that has been misleading and confusing researchers and scientists. In order to create some distance between this suspicious organization and us, we have created a new email address: contact@eurasc.org. This year, the deadline to send the nominations is February, 28th, 2021. We are looking forward to receiving the nominations. Sincerely yours, Rodrigo Martins (EURASC President)

The European Academy of Sciences mourns the loss of Sir John Meurig Thomas, who recently passed away. He was elected as Member of our Academy in the Materials Science Division in 2010 and received the Blaise Pascal Medal in Materials Science of our Academy in 2014.

A pre-eminent scholar in materials science, Sir Thomas was a scientist, educator and university administrator, whose work had widely acknowledged influence globally. He is generally considered as one of the fathers of solid-state chemistry. He was among the first to use electron microscopy as a tool to study structure/property relationships in materials. His research also had a major impact in heterogeneous catalysis and surface science, as he identified active-site reactivities from the surface morphology of numerous systems.

With his passing, the materials science community and the scientific community in general have lost one of their giants.

Professor Jean-Pierre Gattuso (Laboratoire d'Océanographie, CNRS, Villefranche-sur-mer, France) received the 2020 Ruth Patrick Award of the ASLO (Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography) for "his leadership in, and commitment to, addressing ocean acidification". In 2014, professor Gattuso was elected at the EurASc as one of the Blaise Pascal medallist selected by the Earth and Environmental Sciences division. He is one of the world leaders on ocean acidification which is due to the absorption by the ocean of the anthropogenic atmospheric CO2. He also is deeply involved in the International Panel for Climate Change (IPPC) reports and he did contribute to the China - Europe Frontier Forum on the future of marine sciences and technologies, held in Shanghai and on-line on 20-21 October 2020.