The finalists
Ten universities. Ten projects. Ten academics.
Jiewu Leng
Industry 5.0: Prospect and retrospect
Manufacturing thinking is already moving beyond Industry 4.0. The work surveys Industry 5.0, looking back at how the concept emerged and forward at where it may lead, offering both prospect and retrospect on this next phase of industrial development and the systems that will support it.
Christian Málaga‐Chuquitaype
Innovations in earthquake risk reduction for resilience: Recent advances and challenges
Reducing casualties, physical damage and interruption to critical infrastructure from earthquakes depends on linking multidisciplinary research and technological innovation with policy and engineering practice. Framed by the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the work shares knowledge and promotes discussion of recent advances, challenges and future directions in earthquake risk reduction for resilience.
Rong Wang
Progress of photothermal membrane distillation for decentralized desalination: A review
Professor Wang is Executive Director of the Nanyang Environment and Water Research Institute and a pioneer of advanced membranes for water and energy applications. Her co-authored Water Research review charts progress in photothermal membrane distillation for decentralised desalination, assessing photothermal materials and system designs for off grid water supply.
Seeram Ramakrishna
Professor Ramakrishna directs the Centre for Nanofibers and Nanotechnology at NUS and is known globally for pioneering engineered nanofibres. He co-authored the Nature Reviews Methods Primers primer on electrospinning of nanofibres with collaborators in China, the United Kingdom and Malaysia, setting out methods, materials and applications across the field.
Danail Stoyanov
Surgical data science - from concepts toward clinical translation
Professor Stoyanov develops surgical robotics and artificial intelligence for minimally invasive interventions and co-directs the UCL Hawkes Institute. He co-authored a landmark multi-institution Medical Image Analysis paper mapping how surgical data science can move from concepts toward clinical translation, setting priorities for data driven improvement of interventional healthcare.
Honghui He
Polarisation optics for biomedical and clinical applications: a review
Polarised light carries vectorial information that biological tissue transforms in revealing ways, and such techniques have been harnessed in biological and clinical research for decades. The work draws together methodologies and applications in tissue polarimetry, with emphasis on the Stokes-Mueller formalism, and surveys recent breakthroughs, development trends and potential multimodal uses alongside other techniques.
Satyawan Nagane
Defects in perovskite nanocrystals stand in the way of high-efficiency light-emitting diodes. The work pursues comprehensive defect suppression in these nanocrystals to enable more efficient devices, an approach reported in Nature Photonics by collaborators across five countries working at the frontier of light-emitting materials.
Fu Zhang
FAST-LIO2: Fast Direct LiDAR-Inertial Odometry
Autonomous machines that navigate with laser scanners must fuse sensor data quickly and accurately. The project delivers a fast, robust LiDAR-inertial odometry framework that registers raw points directly to the map, avoiding hand-engineered feature extraction, and maintains the map with an incremental k-d tree, making precise navigation and mapping adaptable to emerging LiDAR sensors with different scanning patterns.
Henry J. Snaith
Ligand-engineered bandgap stability in mixed-halide perovskite LEDs
Reported in Nature, the work addresses the stability of the bandgap in light-emitting diodes made from mixed-halide perovskites. Through ligand engineering, the team, spanning five countries, pursued a way to keep that bandgap stable, a contribution to the wider effort to develop LEDs from these materials.
Xiuping Jia
SpectralGPT: Spectral Remote Sensing Foundation Model
Most artificial intelligence models for imagery are built for ordinary photographs, not the rich spectral data captured from space. The team created SpectralGPT, the first universal remote sensing foundation model purpose-built for spectral imagery, using a three-dimensional generative pretrained transformer that accommodates images of varying sizes, resolutions, time series and regions.
Exclusive to partners
The Subject Awards are open to partner universities.
Partners verify their data, feature their academics, and are eligible for the Subject Awards. Finalists are identified from open data; winners are decided by our editorial team and announced on 15 September 2026.
Explore partnership →The wider slate
Fifteen more candidate partnerships behind the finalists.
Integrated Sensing and Communications: Toward Dual-Functional Wireless Networks for 6G and Beyond
Integrating industry 4.0 for enhanced sustainability: Pathways and prospects
Integrated Sensing and Communications: Toward Dual-Functional Wireless Networks for 6G and Beyond