The prize is honoring scientists for major achievements in the field of chemometry, a research field in chemistry, which focuses on optimal measurement procedures by applying and developing statistical and mathematical methods. Since 1995 only well-known and legendary professors have been awarded with the medal in pure gold – Johan Trygg breaks this trend. As a young associate professor in chemistry, Johan Trygg was rewarded for his efforts in the research field of multivariate data analysis.

“The last two years have been very successful to me. Last year, I received the Elsevier prize and the same year Umeå university funded me with the young investigators’ career award. Now I can add the Herman Wold medal to my list of honors”, says a proud Johan Trygg. “Above all, this prize to me is again a confirmation that Umeå University remains a leader in the area and succeeded with new recruitments after the retirement of Professor Svante Wold”, adds Johan.

Johan is honored for his groundbreaking development of new methods for modeling and interpretation of large complex data sets. This issue is very important in biological and medical research projects. It could help for example to understand the development of diseases better, to make reliable diagnosis and follow up how a patient responds to treatment. The method Johan developed is called OPLS (orthogonal projections to latent structures). It is already in use by more than 150 Swedish companies, 50 international institutions and the ten largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. It has also become standard in the rapidly growing field of metabolomics, the quantitative study of small molecules involved in the metabolism.

The Herman Wold medal is named after Herman Wold (1908-1992), a Swedish statistician known for his work in time series analysis and econometrics. The recipient of the medal is selected by the Swedish Chemical Society’s prize committee and should be a person who has contributed significantly to the development and proliferation of chemometrics in research, development and production. In addition, this should be done ‘in the spirit of Herman Wold’.
See also press release in Swedish

For additional information, contact:
Johan Trygg
Department of Chemistry and Computational Life Science Cluster (CLIC)
phone: 090-786 6917
mobile: 073-0647137
e-mail: johan.trygg @ chem.umu.se

author: Eva-Maria Diehl, information officer, KBC