Fifth presentation of the Dr Uroš Seljak Prizes and Commendations
Event date:
Event location: Assembly Hall University of Ljubljana Rectorate, Kongresni trg 12, Ljubljana
On Friday 9 October 2026 the University of Ljubljana will present the Dr Uroš Seljak Prizes and Commendations for the best scholarly articles by first- and second-cycle students in Slovenia. The awards are intended to encourage students to publish scholarly work and become more actively involved in research.
The Dr Uroš Seljak Prizes are being awarded for the fifth consecutive year following an open call for submissions. They aim to encourage research among students and to recognise and reward outstanding scholarly achievements. Particular emphasis is also placed on the role of supervisors, who receive plaques alongside the prize winners in recognition of their work.
This year’s prizes go to:
- Valter Hudovernik, UL Faculty of Computer and Information Science, for Relational Transformer: Toward Zero-Shot Foundation Models for Relational Data
- Sara Klopčič, UL Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, for Electrically and Geometrically Tunable Photon Pair Entanglement from Ferroelectric Nematic Liquid Crystal
- Jona Novljan, UL Faculty of Biotechnology, for Integrative Profiling of Condensation-Prone RNAs during Early Development
In addition to the main prizes, the committee selected a number of students to receive commendations for their work:
- Luka Andrenšek, UL Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, for A Complete Classification of Endomorphisms of Kiselman’s Semigroup
- Metodi Efremov, University of Nova Gorica, for On the Structure of Double-Coordinator Constructions
- Ajda Klepej, Ana Kukovec, Luka Lončar, Marko Sette and Neža Trček, UL Faculty of Arts, for Empathic Response of Slovene Readers to Poetry in Slovene and English
- Nikolay Kormushev, UL Faculty of Computer and Information Science, for Mitigating Objectness Bias and Region-to-Text Misalignment for Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation
- Tine Šefic, UL Faculty of Medicine, for Effect of Microgravity on the Feasibility and Accuracy of Dental Procedures
The prizes were instituted by Dr Uroš Seljak, a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, an alumnus of the University of Ljubljana and a mentor at the American Slovenian Education Foundation (ASEF). In 2021 he received the prestigious Gruber Cosmology Prize, awarded by the Gruber Foundation at Yale University. He used his $150,000 share of the prize money to establish a charitable fund that provides an annual prize fund of $10,000 in total bearing his name.