The finalists
Ten universities. Ten projects. Ten academics.
Yong‐Sung Lee
What travel modes do shared e-scooters displace? A review of recent research findings
When someone takes a shared e-scooter, which journey are they not making instead? Reviewing recent research from the US and elsewhere, the work finds that e-scooters replace car trips at substantial rates, notably in many US cities, while their role as a complement to public transport varies greatly by city, pointing to where regulation and incentives are needed for proper integration.
Natalie Pang
Making universal digital access universal: lessons from COVID-19 in Singapore
Associate Professor Pang heads NUS Communications and New Media and studies the social dimensions of digital technologies and civil society. Her co-authored paper in Universal Access in the Information Society draws lessons from COVID-19 in Singapore, examining how the pandemic exposed gaps in digital access and what making access truly universal requires.
Matthew O. Jackson
Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility
Social capital has long been thought to influence outcomes from education to health, but testing that has been held back by the absence of network data. Using 21 billion friendships from Facebook, the study measures three distinct kinds of social capital by US postal code (connection across socioeconomic lines, cohesion within friendship networks, and civic engagement) and finds they vary widely between places without closely tracking one another.
Jian‐xin Zhao
Oldest cave art found in Sulawesi
In the limestone karsts of South Sulawesi, the team applied uranium-series dating to two newly found cave paintings of warty pigs. The older, from Leang Tedongnge, has a minimum age of 45,500 years, making it the earliest known representational artwork identified so far, and the researchers are careful to note there is no reason to think it stands alone in the region.
Sarah‐Jayne Blakemore
Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media
Analysing two UK datasets covering 84,011 people aged 10 to 80, the study finds that the link between estimated social media use and life satisfaction is most negative in younger adolescents, with sex differences present only at that stage. Longitudinal data from 17,409 young people suggest distinct developmental windows of sensitivity, occurring at ages 14 to 15 and 19 for males, and 11 to 13 and 19 for females.
Matthijs Rooduijn
Scholars studying populist, far-left and far-right parties have wrestled with how to classify them consistently. Applying expert-informed qualitative comparative classification, the team built the newest version of The PopuList, a database of such parties in Europe since 1989 that combines national experts' in-depth knowledge with systematic comparative analysis across cases and over time.
Cecilia Mascolo
An Empirical Study of Geographic User Activity Patterns in Foursquare
Tracking around 700,000 Foursquare users over more than 100 days, the study analysed check-in dynamics to reveal meaningful spatio-temporal patterns in user mobility and urban spaces. Its findings show how data from location-based social networks can deepen understanding of human movement, and how developers might harness such systems for applications like recommender systems.
Paul S. F. Yip
Professor Yip directs the HKJC Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the University of Hong Kong. He co-authored the Lancet Psychiatry interrupted time series analysis of preliminary suicide data from 21 countries, which found no evidence of an early pandemic rise in suicide numbers and informed international prevention policy.
Melinda Mills
Professor Mills directs the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, combining social science and genetic approaches to population research. She co-authored a population level International Journal of Epidemiology study quantifying life expectancy losses from the COVID-19 pandemic across 29 countries, work conducted with demographers at institutions in Denmark and Germany.
Mateusz Dolata
A sociotechnical view of algorithmic fairness
Algorithmic fairness is often presented as a new technical fix for discrimination in automated decision-making. Reviewing the state of the literature, this paper argues that fairness is inherently a social concept and that what a system actually produces depends on mutual influences between technical and social structures, so the field is better approached through a sociotechnical lens that joins engineering to social research.
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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.
Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility
Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries
COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and hesitancy in low- and middle-income countries
A systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation to climate change
A Guideline for Reporting Mediation Analyses of Randomized Trials and Observational Studies
Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries
Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries
A systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation to climate change
Revisiting Event-Study Designs: Robust and Efficient Estimation
The path to healthy ageing in China: a Peking University-Lancet Commission
A Guideline for Reporting Mediation Analyses of Randomized Trials and Observational Studies
Chemical pollution: A growing peril and potential catastrophic risk to humanity