Presentation of the 2023 Early Career Award Finalists, 9 Nov 2023
Meet the Finalists – live
The Early Career Award highlights innovative project proposals by researchers at the beginning of their careers. To acknowledge the role they play in promoting research quality, they are invited to propose projects that foster research quality and value. The winning project is awarded €100,000. For the 2023 Award our jury selected five Early Career Award finalists from a pool of 160 applicants from around the globe. These finalists presented their projects live on 9 November before the final decision was made - and the international research community was invited to join.
“It is astonishing to see these highly motivated applications aiming at catalyzing systemic change at all levels of the research system. We, the research establishment, should listen, learn, and support.”
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Dirnagl, Award Secretary and Director of the QUEST Center for Responsible Research
The 2023 Early Career Award Finalists
Global Analytical Robustness Initiative – Conducting large-scale assessment of the analytical robustness of 100 research studies - Rotem Botvinik-Nezer, Felix Holzmeister, Maya Mathur, Barnabas Szaszi (Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, Hungary)
"In an international big-team science initiative, we will conduct a large-scale assessment of the analytical robustness of 100 research studies from the behavioral and social sciences. The created unique, open database will enable us to compare practices that could be used by researchers to explore the analytical variability of empirical results systematically. Finally, we will formulate applicable recommendations for different stakeholders (journals, funders, teachers) on potential cross-disciplinary interventions aimed at improving analytical standards."Responsible Research Assessment – Developing valid, reproducible, and non-proprietary quality indicators for research output assessment - Anne Gärtner (TU Dresden, Germany)
“The project is intended to develop valid, reproducible, and non-proprietary quality indicators for research output assessment. It strives to enhance rigor, robustness, and transparency of research in the field of social, behavioral and cognitive sciences by providing positive impulses to the science system through a reweighting of incentive structures.”Disentangling large-scale disease association data – Enhancing the reliability of AI-driven drug repurposing and drug target individuation in precision medicine - David B. Blumenthal (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
“Large-scale disease association databases are widely used in data-centric precision medicine but are biased towards our current mainly organ- and symptom-based disease definitions. In the proposed project, we will develop network-based approaches to disentangle such association data into subsets corresponding to (possibly unknown) disjoint molecular mechanisms. The disentangled association data will be made available to the biomedical community and will improve the reliability of downstream computational approaches such as AI-guided drug repurposing and drug target individuation.”FORRT Replications Team – Tracking and Mainstreaming Replications across the Social, Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences - Helena Hartmann, Leticia Micheli, Sam Parsons, Lukas Wallrich, Flavio Azevedo (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands)
“Replications of previous scientific work are essential to accumulate knowledge and accelerate scientific progress. Despite their relevance, replication studies are under-used and undercited, leading to a biased view of the scientific literature. To address this issue and promote the wider use of replication studies in research, education, and policy, we propose to (1) create and maintain a comprehensive database that catalogs replication efforts across various fields; (2) develop two user-friendly Shiny apps for finding, exploring, and visualizing replication data, enabling field-specific meta-scientific analyses; and (3) conduct several outreach activities to encourage contributions to the database, test the apps, and teach researchers, educators, and policymakers how to best engage with our developed resources.”Scholars in the Global South: Between Precarity and Persecution - Yugank Goyal, Sergio Latorre, Tshepo Madlingozi, Suraj Yengde, Cynthia Farid (University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China)
"This project aims to create a platform for producing research and implement an informed and transparent discussion on academic freedom of scholars and activists, and knowledge production in the Global South. It connects interdisciplinary fields, curates knowledge and cultivates new conceptualizations and innovative theoretical contributions from the Global South."
The event was part of Berlin Science Week, an annual science festival held between November 1 and 10 that brings together thousands of people from the worlds of science, business, politics, the arts, and society.