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.

Verified peers who voted in the 2017 Peer Prize for Women in Science

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

Dr Megan Macdonald from the Australian National University.

2nd with 111 votes

Dr Jillian Garvey from La Trobe University

3rd with 105 votes

Dr Anicee Lombal from the University of Tasmania

4th with 76 votes

Dr Emma Burrows from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health

5th with 64 votes

The MissMethyl team from the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

Top-5 of the Earth, Environmental & Space Science Prize

1st with 102 votes

Dr Gretta Pecl & the Species on the Move Team from the University of Tasmania

2nd with 82 votes

Dr Sarah Morón from the University of Melbourne

3rd with 71 votes

4th with 40 votes

Dr Amy Dougherty from the University of Wollongong

5th with 40 votes

Dr Hannah Fraser from the University of Melbourne

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