Announcing the winners of the 2017 Peer Prize for Women in Science
Last year The Sun Foundation had one goal in mind: celebrate & support inspiring women researchers in Australia taking on some of the world’s toughest scientific challenges. So via Thinkable, they generously setup an annual prize with a $20k donation to make it happen. However there was a problem if we used the traditional closed model to award research.
Firstly, using a few specialist judges creates significant problems when attempting to award high-quality research from over 200 diverse scientific fields. Secondly, the traditional model only celebrates & rewards eventual winners, not all entrants. Thirdly, traditional prize models are limited in how they drive science engagement and knowledge exchange. Finally, science progresses as a community, the traditional model has no way to reward winners collectively from a community of peers.
Our Peer Prize model at Thinkable was built to help overcome these traditional problems by allowing all entrants to showcase their projects widely to fellow peers around the world. The winners are collectively awarded from our verified peer community, driving global engagement, knowledge & wider impact for the prize. With last years success, The Sun Foundation generously increased the research award to $40,000 this year.
For 2017, we had 45 inspiring entries across Australia. After a 10 day peer voting period amongst our community, we had over 50,000 unique views & 1,365 PhD’s vote from hundreds of research organisations across the world. Here is a map from where our community peer votes came from.
Top-5 for the Life Science Prize
Congratulations to everyone — here are the top 5 entries with each receiving 40 or more from top researchers across the world!
1st with 118 votes
2nd with 111 votes
3rd with 105 votes
4th with 76 votes
5th with 64 votes
Top-5 of the Earth, Environmental & Space Science Prize
1st with 102 votes
2nd with 82 votes
3rd with 71 votes
4th with 40 votes
5th with 40 votes
We thank everyone for being involved this year & for sharing research widely amongst our community. We want to particularly thank the Sun Foundation on their generous commitment to Australian research and congratulations to the overall winners.
We will be hosting a range of global peer prizes soon, so be sure to have your colleagues sign up and be verified as a researcher here.
Thanks!
Ben
Chief Scientist, Thinkable.org