For the first time in the history of Vitebsk State University named after P.M. Masherov, employees of the Department of Fundamental and Applied Biology – Associate Professor Evgeny Derzhinsky And Senior Lecturer Vladimir Kotsur – received the Academician V.A. Koptyug Prize, which the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus have awarded to joint Belarusian-Russian research teams since 1999. In 2025, the winners were Belarusian and Siberian scientists who presented a series of scientific papers on the topic «The Relationship between Genetic and Morphological Variability within Intraspecific Complexes».