The Ministry for Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic presents awards every year in the field of science and technology in order to support their development and to acknowledge extraordinary rtesults in this field. At the gala evening event on Thursday, November 8, which was the culmination of the 2018 Week of Science and Technology, the award in the Popularizer of Science category was presented to our specialist in steel metallurgy, Director of Metallography and Defect Analysis at the USSE Research & Development Department, Associate Professor Alica Mašlejová, CSc.

She gained this award for her long years of work with and specialist support for university students in the field of metallurgy, and for her popularization of the day-release form of vocational education. She is known at home and abroad as a promoter of applied industrial research, focusing mainly on the theory of agglomeration of fine-grained iron-ore materials, as well as on biomass usage in the steel industry. She participates regularly in specialist conferences and seminars, and prepares publications together with young researchers, thereby supporting their efforts towards independent innovation. She also works for the European Commission as one of a select group of eleven European experts in the field of agglomeration and blast-furnace production, assessing individual phases of project implementation within the programs of the Research Fund for Coal and Steel (RFCS) and Horizon 2020.