The Netherlands “loses” a Nobel Prize winner to the British

In 2010, Andre Geim was still celebrated as the Dutch Nobel Prize winner, even though he was already living in the United Kingdom at the time and is originally from Russia. Geim himself told de Volkskrant that he considers himself a “Dutch-British Nobel Prize winner, in that order”. He worked at Radboud University in Nijmegen from 1994 to 2001 and is still a professor there.

A few months ago, he received an email from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informing him that he must surrender his passport at the Dutch embassy in London. Protests to the ministry and the IND were to no avail, according to Geim.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs cannot comment on the matter due to privacy regulations. In general, adults who voluntarily take on another nationality automatically lose their Dutch nationality.

Geim says he took British nationality because it was a requirement for receiving a knighthood. But if he had known that he would have to surrender his Dutch passport, he would ‘probably have declined’ the honour, he now says.

Together with Konstantin Novoselov, Geim demonstrated in 2004 that extremely thin layers of carbon can conduct electricity and heat very well. For this discovery, the researchers, who were colleagues in Nijmegen, received not only the Nobel Prize but also a royal honour. Geim is a Commander in the Order of the Netherlands Lion. ‘And yet I was kicked out of the country like a useless thing,’ he says in de Volkskrant.