Thursday, November 25, 2021

Promoting Quality in Research: the inaugural Einstein Foundation Awards, 2021

 I had the privilege of being a member of the jury for the Einstein Foundation Awards, which were awarded yesterday for the first time.

Here's the award booklet: 

EINSTEIN FOUNDATION AWARD 2021 PROMOTING QUALITY IN RESEARCH

Individual Award 2021:  Paul Ginsparg

"Preprints have been shared in the physics community since the early 1950s but mostly among well established professors. Physicist Paul Ginsparg, who receives the Einstein Foundation’s Individual Award, set out to democratize access to scientific results. Today, his preprint server arXiv has spread to many other fields—and made science progress more efficient and fairer."


Institutional Award 2021: The Center for Open Science

"Open research is on the rise, but a lot of research information still remains behind closed doors. The Center for Open Science, recipient of the Institutional Award, advocates for more transparency and open access, training scientists, publishers and funders, providing technology and policy recommendations. With this multi pronged approach, it has helped create an open science community which is becoming ever more self-sustaining."


Early Career Researcher Award 2021: "ManyBabies5: Teaming up for Developmental Science → manybabies.github.io/MB5

"Unlike adult subjects, babies cannot tell you what they are thinking. Therefore, researchers studying infant development use looking patterns to understand how babies think and feel about the world. “An overwhelming majority of studies use looking time to make inferences about infant cognition,” comments Martin Zettersten from Princeton University in the United States. But what exactly is it that drives babies to pay attention to different things? To come up with a statistically sound answer to this question, he and his colleague Jessica Kosie initiated ManyBabies5, a large international consortium of infant researchers. “We aim to increase diversity amongst researchers and test subjects alike and collaboratively want to come up with the best test possible on how different factors matter in infant looking time,” Jessica Kosie explains. To that end, the ManyBabies team will put together a diverse and sizeable sample of infants around the world. “To me, team science is a useful tool for producing high quality, robust science,” says Martin Zettersten. “Embracing this approach as a field as many groups are doing right now—that feels revolutionary to me.”


THE JURY The Einstein Foundation Council has convened an outstanding group of scholars representing the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. The international jury is presided over by Dieter Imboden and both defines the objectives of the award and selects the awardees. The following jury members have been appointed for the first three year term: DIETER IMBODEN (President), PhD, Theoretical Physics; Professor Emeritus of Environmental Physics, ETH Zürich; DOROTHY BISHOP, PhD, Neuropsychology; Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology, Oxford University; ALASTAIR BUCHAN, MD, PhD, Medicine; Professor of Stroke Medicine, Oxford University; MICHEL COSNARD, PhD, Computer Science; Professor Emeritus of Informatics, Université de Côte d’Azur; LORRAINE DASTON, PhD, History of Science; Director Emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin; MOSHE HALBERTAL, PhD, Philosophy; Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Hebrew University; LENA LAVINAS, PhD, Economics; Professor of Welfare Economics, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; JULIE MAXTON, PhD, Law; Executive Director of the Royal Society, London; MARCIA MCNUTT, PhD, Geophysics; President of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States; EDWARD MIGUEL, PhD, Economics; Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley; ALVIN ROTH, PhD, Economics; Professor of Economics, Stanford University; SOAZIC ELISE WANG SONNE, Economist, World Bank Group; PhD Fellow, United Nations University; SUZY STYLES, PhD., Psychology; Professor of Psycholinguistics, Nanyang Technological University; E. JÜRGEN ZÖLLNER, Dr. Dr. h.c. mult., Medicine; Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Stiftung Charité, Senator (ret.), Berlin

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Here's my earlier description of the award:

Saturday, December 12, 2020


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