Björn Ekwall Memorial Foundation Award 2019

The main goal of the BEMF is to honour the memory of Dr. Björn Ekwall by giving a reward to the scientists who have substantially contributed to the field of cell toxicology, e.g. by developing new in vitro tests, or via mechanistic or validation studies.

Dr. Jan van der Valk, director of the 3Rs-Centre Utrecht Life Sciences at the faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, is the recipient of the Björn Ekwall Memorial Award for the year 2019 in recognition of his persistent, engaged, informative, and reliable work based on facts in informing the scientific community about the concern of using fetal bovine serum in cell culture medium from an animal ethical view point as well as in the perspective of reproducibility issues. Jan van der Valk is also recognized for his efforts in establishing the fetal bovine serum free data base (fcs-free.org).