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In 2024 the Zimin Foundation supported projects in several major areas: science and education (including the Enlightener Award, the Zimin Institutes, SMTB, etc); humanitarian aid for Ukraine; freedom of speech and information (including Redcollegia Award for journalists, the Memorial archives, etc). In 2025, the ZF will carry on its activities with the same priorities, i.e. spreading enlightenment in its broadest sense, supporting the freedom of thought and speech, and promoting the importance of knowledge and books.
A major Zimin Institute Conference took place in May 2024 at the Technion, the main technological university of Israel. The conference was led by Tech-AI.Biomed, the medical arm of the Technion’s Artificial Intelligence Center, and welcomed 350 attendees, including Nobel laureates and BigTech leaders. The event focused on the translation of academic innovation into medical applications. During the conference, the winners of the 2024 Zimin Foundation grants were announced.
Another ZI milestone of this year was the announcement of partnership with Yuri Milner and his Breakthrough Foundation. The third Zimin Institute, which is scheduled to open in 2025 at one of Israeli universities, is going to be founded with participation from the Breakthrough Foundation.
Also in 2024, the new Tel Aviv University Zimin Institute director, professor Ran Gilad-Bachrach, replaced professor David Mendlovic, who has retired but will remain an advisor to the Institute.
In 2024 the Schoolmet up at the Sabanci University in Istanbul. It was the first live session of SMTB since 2019 to be attended by all the students who had been admitted. Participants came from 16 countries: USA, UK, Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Poland, Serbia, Hungary, Ukraine, Macedonia, Cyprus, Germany, and Bangladesh. An independent admission procedure was employed to select five students from Ukraine.
In parallel with science classes, the alumni were offered a special ESL program on the same campus with the aim of reassembling the alumni community. The School is undertaking a large survey to reconnect with the community and start restructuring the interaction with and within it. In the process the School is making a special effort not to alienate the Ukrainian members of the community, even though they are less numerous than the alumni from Russia.
In 2025 the SMTB plans to continue its work and hold another School session in July.
The Enlightener Awards, as usual, were presented in five nominations: two Enlightener prizes (one for natural and one for humanitarian sciences); two Enlightener.Translation prizes (one for natural and one for humanitarian sciences); and the special Politprosvet award for political writing. This year, over 350 books and authors were competing for the Enlightener Awards from Russia and the EU. Sixteen jury members, leading specialists and scholars in various fields of science, long-listed sixty-seven participants, then narrowed the list to twenty-one, and finally named five laureates. The awards ceremony went live simultaneously in Berlin and Moscow, gathering over 300 offline guests and more than 2000 online viewers on social media.
Also in 2024, scholars associated with the Enlightener Prize delivered about ten lectures in Russian, English, French, Serbian languages in France, Montenegro, Serbia, and the UK. The lecture program acquired new partners this year: Gorod (Germany), Auditoria (Montenegro), Adaptation (Serbia), and Pushkin House (UK).
Beside that, in 2024 the Enlightener Book Clubs, which focus on popularizing books from the award’s long lists, led 27 meetings, or 54 hours of book discussions, involving 60 club members. In 2025 it is planned to develop the Book Clubs project into the Enlightener Club, where authors and lecturers will be involved in discussions of the books they have read, expanding the project's audience several times over.
In 2024 this program amounted to 22.4 percent of the total ZF budget (as compared to 18.2 percent in 2023). Help for Ukraine includes education and science communication projects, some of them operating in Ukraine, some in Europe. Most of these projects cannot be announced publicly but will continue to receive support in 2025.
A partner organisation in Kiev takes high-school students from border zones to educational getaway camps in safe regions of the Carpathian Mountains. In 2024 the ZF supported three rotations of children at the camp, two in summer and one in autumn. Thanks to that experience the Ukrainian government is launching an educational program to allow children to receive educational assistance all year long.
Another project in Ukraine that the ZF will keep supporting is the center offering psychological counselling to women and children who have lost loved ones in the war. In 2024 this project included three two-week rehabilitation programs. The ZF also supports trauma counselling for children, teachers, and parents at the ORT Ukraine School 141 in Kyiv.
The Ukrainian Libraries Renaissance program helps restore libraries on the liberated territories of Ukraine. In 2023 the program embraced 30 libraries. In 2024, it expanded to add 55 more libraries with the aim of giving each one 200 books and an ASUS laptop to facilitate operations. The ULR has purchased 5,965 books from local publishers, following the list of 500 essential titles put together by the Association of Ukrainian Librarians. In 2025 it plans to launch the Bibliobus, a mobile library in a bus, which will travel around Ukraine and visit far-off settlements and military hospitals.
In July 2024, SMTB held its second Ukrainian Biological Data Science Summer School in Uzhgorod. The curriculum was taught to 58 Ukrainian students in the English language. The two-week program focused on basic and advanced methods of bioinformatics and computational data analysis of modern data types in biology. In 2025 SMTB plans to return to Uzhgorod for another school session.
The Union School in Wroclaw allows more than 220 children refugees of all ages (grades 1 through 11) to follow the curriculum taught in the Ukrainian language and certified by the Ukrainian Education Ministry. The Zimin Foundation is the Union school’s only sponsor since its foundation in 2022.
Books Follow is a project that collects and delivers books in the Ukrainian language to refugee centers all over Europe. In 2024 the project opened mobile libraries in Tbilisi, Padua, Prague, Split, etc.
Also in 2024, in cooperation with the Nemtsov Foundation, we offered Ukrainian students 13 scholarships to study abroad. Students from Ukraine are currently enrolled in several higher education schools in the Czech Republic, such as Charles University, School of Economics, Prague Academy of Arts. The program came to an end in 2024.
The Tomorrow Foundation helps Ukrainian children who have lost one or both parents during the war. In August 2024, with support from Zimin Foundation, they brought 169 teenagers to an education camp at Durham University (United Kingdom).
In 2024 the Redcollegia Prize continued to reward three or four new winners each month with a shared prize fund of €10,000. Redcollegia also launched a new special award “For Personal Courage and Fidelity to the Profession” to support journalists who have shown extraordinary human and professional qualities in the face of pressure from the authorities and rising oppression of independent journalism.
The Zimin Foundation has set aside an extra emergency fund to help journalists who are being prosecuted for their work and are facing difficulties. Redcollegia analyzed the economic sustainability of the most prominent Russian media operating in exile and divided the Zimin Foundation’s support fund between 20 different editorial teams, which received substantial financial help. The experts and members of the Redcollegia’s jury have also been analyzing incoming requests from journalists who need urgent medical treatment, legal assistance, emergency relocations, help with lost professional equipment, etc.
In March 2024, the award welcomed over 180 participants at its annual large conference, in November 2024, Redcollegia held its second conference of the year.
In 2024, the ZF added a new project to its portfolio: the Cyprus Child Rehabilitation Program. Under this program, the ZF collaborates with four local rehabilitation centres and an expert committee to provide accessible and effective therapy support to Cyprus children with special/rehabilitation needs.
In 2024, the program received 24 applications and approved 18 grants, distributed directly to providers for approved therapy needs: physiotherapy, ABA therapy, speech and ergo therapies, special education. Through collaboration with local centres, the program is building a supportive network of Cypriot professionals and resources for long-term impact.
The program’s expert committee, comprising community leaders, philanthropy and health experts, will continue to play a pivotal role in its decision-making. For 2025, the committee will maintain a 3-5 year member term structure for continuity, transparency, and expertise in funding allocations.
The Zimin Foundation is opening a new Summer Internship Program. The grant for undergraduate research will fund internships in laboratories around the world in the field of Life Sciences for a period from six weeks up to three months in the summer of 2025. The program is intended for undergraduates (including Masters) who have not yet been accepted into a PhD program. Participants are required to independently find a laboratory willing to host them for the internship.
The ZF will also continue to provide resources to fund the Fedor Stepun Fellowship Program, which supports Russian and Ukrainian scientists at risk due to the war in Ukraine. Under the program, launched at Ruhr University in 2022, eight half-year fellowships have just been awarded to postdocs at risk. The foundation continues to support its scholars at the Hunter College, New York, and Charles University, Prague.
Here are some other projects that received support from the Zimin Foundation in 2024: Memorial, the Sakharov Center, Free University, Re:Russia research project, several summer schools, the congress of the Independent Philosophy Institute (Budwa), stipends for Ukrainian students at the Le Salley Academy, a recreational center for Ukrainian refugees in Tallinn, assistance for lawyers and rights activists in Russia, cultural projects of educational nature, such as discussion programs at the Pushkin House (London) and a stipend for young musicians in the memory of Pavel Kushnir.
Published
December 29, 2024
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