Lieven Vandersypen is to receive two international scientific prizes this year. He will be awarded the Nicholas Kurti European Science Prize for his work on the coherent control of nuclear and electron spins, with possible application to quantum computing. The experiments with nuclear spins he carried out as a Stanford University PhD student working at the IBM Almaden Research Center in California. In Delft, Vandersypen works on electron spins in "quantum dots" (nanoscale semiconductor traps for electrons). For his Delft contributions to the read-out and control of individual electron spins, he also receives the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize for Semiconductor Physics.