Virginie Simon, CEO and co-founder of Luxembourg company MyScienceWork, has been awarded the trophy for French people abroad, presented yesterday at the Quai d’Orsay.
Organised by Le Petit Journal under the patronage of the Secretary of State for Foreign Trade, Tourism and French People Abroad, the trophy highlights the achievements of French people around the world across seven different domains, including art and culture, education, social and humanitarian work, and entrepreneurialism.
Virginie Simon took the prize for entrepreneurialism thanks to MyScienceWork which she co-founded shortly after finishing her PhD with a thesis on nanotechnology in the fight against cancer.
Virginie welcomed the recognition for her and her team’s work, and for Luxembourg.
"I'm really proud to be nominated for the Entrepreneur category out of a total of 255 applications. It is a great honour for the team and the company MyScienceWork. I am also proud to be able to highlight Luxembourg, which has always supported me and brought me along the different developments,” she said.
Virginie created MyScienceWork in 2012 in order to democratise access to science, disseminate knowledge and to facilitate collaborations. With offices now in Paris, Luxembourg and San Francisco. It does this through the MyScienceWork.com global research network including the Polaris institutional platforms, scientific communication and data mining services. Today, MyScienceWork offers a library of more than 60 million research papers from more than 40,000 newspapers identifying more than 40 million authors.
Today, it is the first scientific database in Open Access, centralising 66 million scientific publications and patents, and the site is visited by more than a million visitors per month.
This adds to Virginie’s already impressive stock of international prizes, of which she can count five. She won an Excellence Award in 2008, Sensational Award in 2010, "Best Business Entrepreneur of the Year" at the 2011 Entrepreneur Awards, MyScienceWork was selected by Challenges Magazine in 2016 as one of “the 30 international start-ups to invest in", and Virginie was recognised by the Berlin magazine The Hundert that same year, listing the 100 best female entrepreneurs in Europe.
