Beata Niemczyk-Soczyńska, PhD, from the Laboratory of Polymers and Biomaterials, and Jędrzej Dobrzański, PhD, from the Department of Mechanics of Materials, were recognized for their outstanding doctoral dissertations.
To honor contributions to the advancement of Polish science, the Prime Minister annually grants awards that recognize exceptional doctoral dissertations, scientific achievements leading to habilitation degrees, and accomplishments in scientific, artistic, and implementation activities.
Two of this year’s 25 awarded doctoral dissertations were authored by researchers from our Institute.
Beata Niemczyk-Soczyńska, PhD, received the award for her dissertation titled “Thermosensitive hydrogels loaded with bioactive nanofibers as scaffolds for tissue engineering.”
Jędrzej Dobrzański, PhD, was honored for his dissertation titled “Finite-element modelling of moving weak discontinuities using laminated microstructures.”
Dr inż. Beata Niemczyk-Soczyńska graduated from AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków. In 2016, she started doctoral studies at the Laboratory of Polymers & Biomaterials at the IPPT PAN, where she is presently employed as an Assistant Professor.
In 2019, as part of the NAWA project, Dr. Beata Niemczyk-Soczyńska completed two month-long fellowships abroad at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, United States. In 2020, as part of the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange project, she completed a month-long fellowship at Ino Cure s.r.o. in Prague, Czech Republic.
The research conducted by Dr. Beata Niemczyk-Soczyńska is interdisciplinary, combining both fundamental and applied research. The studies focus on designing and forming injectable thermosensitive hydrogels filled with bioactive electrospun nanofibers as scaffolds for neural tissue regeneration or as a 3D cell culture model.
Between 2019 and 2022, Dr. Beata Niemczyk-Soczyńska led the PRELUDIUM 15 project, funded by the National Science Center (NCN), titled "Thermosensitive hydrogels filled with bioactive nanofibers for regeneration of neural tissue."
She is the author of 12 scientific publications published in journals indexed by the MEiN, as well as the author of 8 conference presentations and 2 patent applications. According to the Scopus database, her Hirsch index is 10, and the citation number is 402.
Besides scientific activity, Dr. Beata Niemczyk-Soczyńska also actively participates in science-popularization events such as the Science Festival or the Materials Engineering Days. She is currently the auxiliary supervisor of a doctoral dissertation conducted at the IPPT PAN, under the guidance of Professor Paweł Sajkiewicz.
Dr inż. Jędrzej Dobrzański is a graduate of the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology. He completed his BSc and MSc, graduating with distinction at the master’s level, and received faculty awards for top graduates. In 2018 he began doctoral studies at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology under Prof. Dariusz Łydżba, and a year later - after winning a National Science Centre (NCN) grant competition for a doctoral scholarship - moved to the Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Polish Academy of Sciences (IPPT PAN) to continue his research under Prof. Stanisław Stupkiewicz. His project focused on new computational methods for modeling of sharp and diffuse discontinuities, which formed the basis of his PhD thesis, defended with distinction in December 2024.
In early 2025, Dr. Dobrzański won the national stage of the prestigious ECCOMAS PhD Awards, which annually recognize the best doctoral dissertations in computational methods for applied sciences and engineering. Six months later, he went on to win the ECCOMAS PhD Olympiad, honoring the authors of the best presentations of the dissertations selected in the earlier competition.
In 2025, under the MSCA RISE EffectFact project, Dr. Jędrzej Dobrzański completed a one-month research internship at C3M d.o.o., while simultaneously establishing collaboration with the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering at the University of Ljubljana. He is currently a member of the Materials Modeling Group in the Department of Mechanics of Materials at IPPT PAN, where he contributes to research on the development of the phase-field method. Among his other roles, he serves as a researcher on two projects: one led by Prof. Stanisław Stupkiewicz, investigating the effect of diffusion on the formation of the omega phase in metastable beta-titanium alloys; and the other led by Dr. Mohsen Rezaee Hajidehi, focusing on modeling of fatigue in shape-memory alloys.
