The three winners of the 2015 PJ ZEON Award have been announced by the Society of Polymer Science Japan (SPSJ) as follows:

Tomoyuki Ikai (Kanazawa University, Japan) for the contribution ‘Synthesis of polyisocyanides bearing oligothiophene pendants: higher-order structural control through pendant framework design’, Vol. 47, No. 9, 2015.

Shingo Ito (The University of Tokyo, Japan) for the contribution ‘Formal aryne/ethylene copolymerization to form polyethylene containing o-arylene units in the main chain’, Vol. 47, No. 7, 2015.

Takaya Terashima (Kyoto University, Japan) for the contribution ‘Single-chain crosslinked star polymers via intramolecular crosslinking of self-folding amphiphilic copolymers in water’ Vol. 47, No. 10, 2015.

Ikai, Ito and Terashima received their award certificates and medals at an award ceremony held in conjunction with the SPSJ annual meeting in May 2016 in Kobe. Each winner also received a cash prize of 300 000 Japanese yen and gave an invited talk based on their respective papers.

On behalf of the editors and editorial board of Polymer Journal, I wish to congratulate Ikai, Ito and Terashima on this honor in recognition of their excellent papers.1, 2, 3 I hope the award will provide encouragement to these young researchers for their bright future careers. Academic profiles of the winners can be found below this announcement.

The PJ ZEON Award started since 2005 as the successor of The PJ Paper Award, which started since 1992.

This PJ ZEON Award is open to all of the first author of papers published in Polymer Journal.4 We are looking forward to receiving your submission papers and many applications for the 2016 PJ ZEON Award. Each year, the SPSJ selects up to three most outstanding papers published by young authors in Polymer Journal, as recommended by the selection committee and board of directors of the SPSJ. Those who are interested should go to the SPSJ website (http://main.spsj.or.jp/) for further information. Finally, we express our sincere appreciation to Zeon Corporation for their generous sponsorship of this award.