Job openings & fellowships Job openings
Select Page
Herbert and fellow recipients of the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize in Biology
Herbert and fellow recipients of the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Not a Nobel

ICFO alum recipient of Ig Nobel Prize

October 08, 2019

ICFO has its own Nobel laureate, although not the “Swedish” kind. This past September, ICFO alumnus Herbert Crepaz and collaborators received the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize in Biology, for discovering that dead magnetized cockroaches behave differently than…living magnetized cockroaches.

Each year, the Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think". These prizes celebrate unusual or trivial research, with the aim to spur people’s interest in science and technology.

Dr. Crepaz pursued his PhD at ICFO and graduated in 2007, making him one the institute’s first PhD graduates. His thesis, titled Trapping and cooling rubidium atoms for quantum information” , was supervised by former ICFO Prof. Jürgen Eschner. “Being the first in Spain to produce cold atoms was a great professional achievement”, Herbert says, who is now living in his home country of Bulgaria as an R&D engineer.