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Nominees and winners 2006
In 2006, the European Patent Office and the European Commission Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry hosted the first ever European Inventor of the Year awards. Awards were presented in six categories at a ceremony at the Autoworld Museum in Brussels on 3 May 2006. The jury selected the following finalists:
Lifetime achievement
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Winner: Federico Faggin (Italy)
Microprocessor Chip -
Karlheinz Brandenburg (Germany)
MP3 format -
James Dyson (United Kingdom)
Dyson bagless vacuum cleaner
Industry
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Winners: Zbigniew Janowicz and Cornelius Hollenberg (Germany)
Process for producing foreign proteins in Hansenula yeasts -
Claude Berrou (France)
Turbo codes for transferring data -
Joan Eleanor Tarbox, Paul Laurence Scrivener & Giorgio Grasso (Italy)
Erbium-doped fibre amplifiers
Small and medium-sized enterprises
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Winners: Stephen P. A. Fodor, Michael C. Pirrung, J. Leighton Read and Lubert Stryer (Netherlands/USA)
DNA chip -
Magnus Malmqvist, Robert Karlsson and Inger Rönnberg (Sweden)
Surface plasmon resonance -
François Geronimi (France)
Electronic signature computation on a smart card
Universities and research institutions
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Winner: Peter Grünberg (Germany)
Giant-Magnetoresistance Effect
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Richard Friend, Jeremy Burroughes and Donal Bradley (United Kingdom)
Polymer organic light-emitting diodes -
Michel Bruel (France)
Simplified method for producing semiconductors in ultra-thin silicon wafers
New EU member states
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Winners: John Starrett, Joanne Bronson, John Martin, Muzammil Mansuri and David Tortolani (Czech Republic)
Linnovative prodrugs of phosphonates -
Wojciech Stec (Poland)
Method for producing modified P-chiral nucleotide analogs that can be used to synthesise optimised oligonucleotides -
Danijel Kikelj (Slovenia)
Derivatives and analogues of MDP that possess strong biological activity and have strong immuno-stimulatory and anti-tumour effects
Non-European inventions
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Winners: Larry Gold and Craig Tuerk (USA)
Screening process used in biochemistry to find unique oligonucleotides capable of binding to specific proteins that cause disease -
Charles E. Perkins (USA)
Mobile IP -
Martin Andrew Green and Stuart Ross Wenham (Australia)
Converting solar energy directly into electrical power