Professor Teun Klapwijk, Professor of Nanotechnology and former Scientific Director of the Casimir Research School, was appointed Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion in the Diligentia Theater in The Hague on the 26th of April.

Professor Teun Klapwijk received this award for his pioneering and leading academic work. Professor Klapwijk is a pioneer in the field of superconductors. In 1982, along with Greg Blonder and Michael Tinkham, he described what is currently known as the Blonder-Tinkham-Klapwijk theory, a model that helps scientists determine superconducting properties of new materials with quick and easy experiments.  For his outstanding experiments in the field of superconductivity he received the prestigious Heike Kamerling Onnes price in 2012.

He is also known for his contributions to the Herschel Space Telescope of the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), the large astronomical observatory in Chile. There, the strength of superconductivity is used in astronomy experiments.
Professor Klapwijk has trained a new generation of leading physicists in the field of astronomical instrumentation. Apart from establishing the Leiden-Delft Casimir Research School, he was also at the forefront of initiatives such as the Zernike Institute, the Lorentz Centre, and the Delft-Leiden joint program on Astronomy and Instrumentation.

The Casimir Research School congratulates Teun Klapwijk with this great honour.