ESET Science Award 2025: Congratulations to Daniela Vacek and Martin Kahanec
This year’s ESET Science Award 2025, which recognises leading scientific personalities in Slovakia, brought success to two figures closely connected with Comenius University Bratislava. In the category Outstanding Scientist in Slovakia Under the Age of 35, the international jury of experts honoured philosopher Daniela Vacek, a graduate of the CU Faculty of Arts and a member of its Department of Logic and the Methodology of Sciences. The main prize, Outstanding Scientist in Slovakia, went to CU alumnus Professor Martin Kahanec.
Dr Daniela Vacek’s research focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence, analytic aesthetics, and philosophical logic. Alongside her role at the CU Faculty of Arts, she works as a researcher in the Department of Analytic Philosophy at the Slovak Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Philosophy, and at the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies. At the Department of Logic and the Methodology of Sciences of the Faculty of Arts, she is a member of the research team of the APVV project Semantics of Conditionals (CONDITIO).
The winner of the main ESET Science Award category, Outstanding Scientist in Slovakia, was economist Professor Martin Kahanec of Central European University in Vienna and the University of Economics in Bratislava. From 2022 to 2024 he served on the CU Board of Trustees, and he is currently a member of the Scientific Council of the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences. Professor Kahanec is a graduate of the CU Faculty of Management, where he earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
For the first time, this year the award was also open to researchers from the social sciences and humanities.