Press releaseQUEST Center
Einstein Foundation Award – The 2022 Awardees
The €500,000 Einstein Award for Promoting Quality in Research honors researchers and institutions whose work helps to fundamentally advance the quality and robustness of research findings. The recipient of this year’s international Individual Award is Canadian physician Gordon Guyatt for the development of best practices for all areas of clinical research that are now applied worldwide. The 2022 Institutional Award honors the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA), a network of 1,400 researchers in 71 countries working to improve the quality of psychological research practice. The early career award was given to the Ape Research Index, which strives to pin down bias by quantifying the impact of an ape’s previous experience in research. The award office is headed by Ulrich Dirnagl, Founding Director of the QUEST Center at the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH).
“The award is the first to honor efforts to improve research quality,” said Martin Rennert, Chair of the Einstein Foundation’s Executive Board. “The award’s aim is to provide global visibility and recognition for those engaging with this challenge. For the Einstein Foundation, the prize is an opportunity to help raise standards, increase the efficiency of research quality evaluations, and strengthen trust in science and research in general.”
The award is presented in three categories to individual researchers, institutions, and early career researchers. Awardees are selected by a prestigious international jury of renowned researchers representing the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. “Gordon Guyatt’s achievements perfectly reflect the award’s objective” said jury member Alastair Buchan, Einstein Visiting Fellow and Professor of Stroke Medicine at Oxford University. “His pioneering work in evidence-based medicine has had a tremendous impact on the quality of clinical research, health care, and health care policy.“This year’s institutional awardee, the Psychological Science Accelerator, has developed a unique transformative approach to raise scientific standards by ensuring that research is truly diverse and democratic,” commented jury member Dorothy Bishop, Emeritus Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology at Oxford University.
This year’s award jury includes Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, Julie Maxton, Executive Director of the Royal Society, Alvin Roth, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, the science historian Lorraine Daston, the philosopher Moshe Halbertal, the computer scientist Michel Cosnard, economists Lena Lavinas and Edward Miguel, the psycholinguist Suzy Styles, the social scientist Soazic Elise Wang Sonne, and Jürgen Zöllner, former Senator for Higher Education and Research of the State of Berlin, now representing the Damp Stiftung.
The award is generously funded by the Damp Stiftung. Additional resources are made available by the State of Berlin.
The award office is headed by Ulrich Dirnagl, Founding Director of the QUEST Center at the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH). The QUEST (Quality, Ethics, Open Science, Translation) Center, the Max Planck Foundation, and the Public Library of Science (PLOS) are supporting the Einstein Foundation in establishing the award. The Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Klaus Groth Stiftung are award ceremony partners.