Submissions open for the 2023 Einstein Foundation Award – The €500,000 award aims to recognize efforts to promote quality in research
The Einstein Foundation Berlin is inviting researchers and organizations to submit their application, or to nominate colleagues or institutions, for the 2023 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. Applications can be submitted from any discipline and global region. The deadline is April 30, 2023, and the awardees will be announced at the end of this year.
The €500,000 Einstein Award for Promoting Quality in Research honors researchers, institutions, and early career researchers around the globe whose work helps to fundamentally advance the quality, transparency, and reproducibility of science and research. Improving global access to research findings (open science), studies on the reproducibility of scientific results, overcoming the fragmentation of research (team science) as well as enhancing the diversity of the research community are just some of the many initiatives that the Foundation is looking to acknowledge with this award.
The award is presented in three separate categories. The Individual Award honors individual researchers or small teams of collaborating researchers, while the Institutional Award recognizes organizations and research institutions. Awardees in both categories will receive a €200,000 prize. The €100,000 Early Career Award highlights innovative project proposals by researchers at the beginning of their careers. “From the natural sciences to the humanities, we are hoping to once again receive a high number of outstanding applications and are looking forward to being able to shine a light on the exceptional contributions of researchers and initiatives from all corners of the globe,” said Einstein Foundation Award Scientific Secretary Ulrich Dirnagl.
Canadian physician Gordon Guyatt was the recipient of the 2022 Individual Award. Guyatt is a pioneer in evidence-based medicine and one of the world’s most influential medical researchers, having developed clinical research best practices that are now applied worldwide. The 2022 Institutional Award was presented to the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA), a global network that promotes internationally networked research in large teams (known as big-team science) in order to make psychology research findings reproducible and relevant across cultures. The winners in the Early Career Award category were Elisa Bandini (University of Tübingen) and Sofia Forss (University of Zurich), who developed the Ape Research Index, which aims to highlight an aspect that has previously been neglected in behavioral experiments involving primates, namely the training effect on their cognitive abilities.
All submissions will be reviewed by an international jury of renowned researchers, including Dieter Imboden, physicist and former president of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, Dorothy Bishop, psychologist and co-founder of the UK Reproducibility Network, Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, Julie Maxton, executive director of the Royal Society, as well as Alvin Roth, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. The award office is headed by neurologist Ulrich Dirnagl, founding director of the QUEST Center at the Berlin Institute of Health.
The award is generously funded by the Damp Stiftung. Additional resources are made available by the State of Berlin. The Einstein Foundation Award has also partnered with the QUEST Center for Responsible Research at the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) and the Max Planck Foundation and is collaborating with two media partners: Nature Portfolio and the Public Library of Science (PLOS), an open-access publisher.
To learn more about the various award categories, the selection criteria and eligibility requirements, as well as the jury, and to view portraits of past recipients and presentations by previous Early Career Award finalists, please visit www.einsteinfoundation.de/en/award.
About the Einstein Foundation Berlin and the Damp Foundation
The Einstein Foundation Berlin is an independent, non-profit, science-led organization established as a foundation under civil law in 2009. It promotes international cutting-edge science and research across disciplines and institutions in and for Berlin. In the last fourteen years, it has funded over 200 researchers – including three Nobel laureates – more than 70 projects, and seven Einstein Centers. The Damp Stiftung was established by Dr. Walter Wübben, the former majority owner of the Klinikgruppe Damp, to fund medical research and teaching as well as social projects.