Nominations for the 2026 George Gamow® Award are open through July 20, 2026.
The George Gamow® Award is presented to members of the Russian-speaking scientific community in recognition of their outstanding contributions to world science across a range of disciplines, as well as efforts to promote international collaboration.
The award is named after George Gamow, an outstanding Soviet and American physicist and popularizer of science, who made a pioneering contribution to the creation of the theory of alpha decay, the "hot Universe" model, and the application of nuclear physics to the problems of stellar evolution. He also made a significant contribution to biology, being the first to formulate the problem of the genetic code. Gamow was a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
George Gamow was recognized by UNESCO with the Kalinga Prize in 1956, "For his outstanding contribution to the popularization of science," for his popular-science Mr. Tompkins series of children's books, which explained advanced science to new generations and brought many Americans into the scientific field.