This year, the first Mantvydas Juozapavičius Named Scholarships were awarded to members of the Vilnius University (VU) community. A total prize fund of €7,500 was shared by two talented VU researchers and one student: Dr Mindaugas Šarpis, Dr Antanas Terleckas, and Ūla Marija Lauciūtė.
The named scholarships are funded from the Mantvydas Juozapavičius Endowment Sub-fund, established in 2024 within the VU Foundation. The subfund was created by his parents, philanthropists Irena and Algirdas Juozapavičiai, from the estate of their son, who passed away in 2023. The scholarships are awarded from the investment returns of the sub-fund.
The largest scholarship, €4,000, was awarded to Dr Mindaugas Šarpis, a research scientist at the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnology of the VU Faculty of Physics. He is one of the few experts in the world on pentaquark research. He has also made a significant contribution to the CERN LHCb Open Data initiative: guided by FAIR and open science principles, he prepared and released 1 petabyte of LHCb experimental data and created more than 7,000 pages of documentation, which are now available to the international scientific community.
Dr Mindaugas Šarpis and Prof. Aidas Matijošius
A €2,500 scholarship was awarded to Ūla Marija Lauciūtė, a master’s student in Laser Physics and Optical Technologies at the VU Faculty of Physics. She completed an internship at the ELI-ALPS research institute in Szeged, Hungary, and received the named Prof. A. P. Piskarskas Scholarship for the best bachelor’s thesis entitled “The Use of Photoactive Compounds in Radiotherapy”. The results of her research were also presented at the international conference “EEDS25”, organized by the Institute of Chemical Physics of the VU Faculty of Physics.
Prof. Aidas Matijošius and Ūla Marija Lauciūtė
A €1,000 scholarship was awarded to Dr Antanas Terleckas, a junior research fellow at the Department of Modern History of the VU Faculty of History. In 2023, he defended his doctoral dissertation entitled “The Creation of a Collective Farm Society: The Sovietization of the Lithuanian Countryside, 1940–1965”. He is currently completing a monograph based on his dissertation, which is planned for publication by the publishing house “Tyto alba” in early 2026. Dr Terleckas’ earlier academic work has been recognized with a scholarship from the Lithuanian Catholic Academy of Sciences in 2020 and the named President Antanas Smetona Scholarship in 2018.
Vilnius University students and researchers who are also alumni of Vilnius Lyceum are eligible to apply for the Mantvydas Juozapavičius Named Scholarship. The scholarship recipients were selected in cooperation with the Vilnius Lyceum Alumni Foundation. Applications were evaluated by a commission composed of representatives of the VU Foundation and the Lyceum Alumni Foundation: Prof. Dr Tadas Malinauskas, Dr Linas Tarasonis, Agnė Reklaitė, Naglis Ramanauskas, and Rasa Tirylytė Zelenina.
Mantvydas Juozapavičius (1976–2023) was an active Lithuanian public figure with a broad education and experience in information management and genealogy. He studied at Vilnius Lyceum, the VU Institute of International Relations and Political Science (IIRPS), and the VU Faculty of Communication, and completed various courses at Rice University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Michigan in the United States. He worked as an assistant in the Lithuanian Parliament, an election observer in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and was a freelance specialist providing various services in information management and data analysis.