The UMAC Award is presented annually to a university museum or collection in the world whose projects or initiatives demonstrate innovation and creativity, excellence, and transferability of ideas that can be adopted by other university museums and collections, and that have significant impact on the host university, the community or society at large. The Award will be announced during the UMAC’s Annual General Meeting at UMAC-UNIVERSEUM Dresden, to be held on 26 September.

Akiko Fukuno Chair of the UMAC Award Committee.

The finalists for the 2024 UMAC Award are (in alphabetical order of the institution): Giovanni PoleniMuseum, University of PaduaProject Title: Science from the Islamic world to today’s Europe. Cross-Fertilization between past and future. Today’s physics and astronomy are the result of millennial exchanges of knowledge between civilizations, and historical scientific instruments are the material evidences of such exchanges. To raise and discuss these topics, four working groups were created, made of members of the local community (mainly foreigners), students of a difficult school, and PhD students. People of various nationalities, languages and very different backgrounds thus worked together: they examined how the instruments kept at Giovanni Poleni Museum were related to various cultures, and developed new proposals to present to a wider audience what can be called “the multiculturality” of science. Cross-fertilisation between past and future.