The finalists
Ten universities. Ten projects. Ten academics.
Rifat Atun
Cancer control in the Commonwealth: a roadmap
Professor Atun is Julio Frenk Professor of Public Health Leadership at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he directs the Health Systems Innovation Lab. His 2024 Lancet Oncology roadmap for cancer control in the Commonwealth, written with international collaborators, sets out how health systems can expand equitable cancer care.
Talya Porat
Impact of patient access to their electronic health record: systematic review
Giving patients sight of their own electronic health records is becoming standard practice, but what does it actually change? Screening more than 2,000 papers and analysing 74, this review draws together the reported benefits and problems of patient access through secure provider portals in primary care and hospitals, covering self-care, quality of care and patient-centred outcomes.
Philip Moons
Professor Moons holds the chair in healthcare and nursing science at KU Leuven's Department of Public Health and Primary Care, researching transition and care for people with congenital heart disease. His 2021 Journal of Advanced Nursing study with colleagues in Belgium, Sweden and South Africa traced illness identity trajectories and their links to patient reported outcomes.
Carl May
Good ideas in healthcare often falter at the point of implementation, which is what Normalisation Process Theory sets out to explain. Working from the papers that developed the theory, the study distils it into a ready-to-use coding manual for qualitative researchers, aiming to make analysis more transparent and to lighten the practical burden on those doing it.
Helena Teede
Professor Teede is Vice-Chancellor's Distinguished Professor at Monash University and directs the Monash Centre for Health Research and Implementation. She led the 2023 international evidence based guideline for assessment and management of polycystic ovary syndrome, published in Human Reproduction, uniting clinicians, researchers and consumers from dozens of institutions worldwide.
Jason Talevski
Health care systems increasingly assume that patients can navigate the digital world, yet some communities are less able or less likely to engage with digital health technologies. Through a systematic review and thematic synthesis of qualitative studies published between 2011 and 2022, the work identifies the barriers and facilitators experienced by culturally and linguistically diverse populations, including minority groups, immigrants and refugees, and Indigenous peoples.
Nicole Mockler
Teachers and school leaders describe work that keeps expanding, and this synthesis of forty studies asks what the research really shows. It distinguishes workload from work intensification, two ideas often conflated, and reports negative effects on health, wellbeing and attrition, alongside concern about teachers' capacity to deliver priorities that support the learning of all students.
Sara Garfield
Involving patients and the public in healthcare is widely endorsed, yet the theory behind it remains thinly developed. This review of reviews gathers evidence on the theories, barriers and enablers of patient and public involvement across health, social care and patient safety, with an eye to addressing power inequities and the limited diversity of those who take part.
I. Sadaf Farooqi
Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology Commission on the Definition and Diagnosis of Clinical Obesity
What counts as clinical obesity, and how should it be diagnosed? Convened as a commission, the work addresses the definition and diagnosis of obesity as a clinical condition, a question that shapes who is recognised as needing care and how that care is described.
Felix H. Krones
Review of multimodal machine learning approaches in healthcare
Clinicians draw on demographics, laboratory results, vital signs and images together, whereas machine learning in medicine has usually worked from one type of data at a time. This review surveys approaches that combine imaging, text, time series and tabular data, walking through the key stages of building such models and how closely they reflect real clinical reasoning.
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.
World guidelines for falls prevention and management for older adults: a global initiative
World guidelines for falls prevention and management for older adults: a global initiative
The Digital Health Competencies in Medical Education Framework
World guidelines for falls prevention and management for older adults: a global initiative
A systematic review of the effect of stigma on the health of people experiencing homelessness
The Digital Health Competencies in Medical Education Framework
Continuity and care coordination of primary health care: a scoping review