The three winners of the 2016 PJ ZEON Award have been announced by the Society of Polymer Science Japan (SPSJ) as follows:

Yasuhiro Matsuda (Shizuoka University, Japan) for the contribution ‘Renaturation behavior of xanthan with high molar mass and wide molar mass distribution’, Vol. 48, No.5, 2016.

Lucia Mergola (University of Salento, Italy) for the contribution‘Novel polymeric sorbents based on imprinted Hg(II)-diphenylcarbazone complexes for mercury removal from drinking water’, Vol. 48, No.1, 2016.

Takamasa Sakai (The University of Tokyo, Japan) for the contribution ‘Sol-gel transition behavior near critical concentration and connectivity’, Vol. 48, No.5, 2016.

Matsuda, Mergola and Sakai received their award certificates and medals at an award ceremony held in conjunction with the SPSJ annual meeting in May 2017 in Makuhari. Each winner also received a cash prize of 300,000 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 Matsuda, Mergola and Sakai 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 first authors of papers published in Polymer Journal4 who are under 38 years of age. We are looking forward to receiving your submission papers and many applications for the 2017 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.