University of Exeter Open Research Awards
The University of Exeter Open Research Awards showcase and reward the very best of student-lead open research practices across all of our departments and faculties.
Exeter Open Research Awards 2026
We are thrilled to announce the fourth Open Research Award competition, where doctoral students from across the university are invited to submit case studies of best practice for open research in their discipline.
The University of Exeter promotes and supports open and reproducible research practices, and this competition is an opportunity to reward PhD students who try to uphold these principles. The competition includes prize vouchers for the best case studies in each of the faculties, and winners will be invited to present their case studies at an award ceremony on June 18 2026 at the South West Institute of Technology (SWIOT) on the Streatham Campus.
A non-exhaustive list of open practices you might want to report on is given below:
- publishing pre-prints
- making code or data freely available
- sharing study materials/questionnaires/protocols openly
- conducting a registered report
- sharing open practices with students or other teaching of open research
- conducting peer coding/review to pre-publication to ensure the rigour of your work
- developing an open-source package/software
Case studies should be submitted by April 29. If you were awarded a prize or commendation in last year's competition, you are not eligible for this round (but please do come along to the awards - we'd love to hear from you again!).
The submissions of case studies which showcase good or innovative open research practices:
Open research awards 2026 (deadline April 29, Registered PhD students only) – Fill in form
Environment, Science and Economy disciplines prize
| Name | Department | Project |
|
Babak Zolghadr-Asli |
Centre for Water Systems |
STML-AquaCrop – An open-source framework for desalinated water optimisation in arid agriculture |
Health and Life Sciences disciplines price
| Name | Department | Project |
|
Bethan Rimmer |
Clinical and Biomedical Sciences |
Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines prize
| Name | Department | Project |
|
Cassia Lynn Johnson |
Camborne School of Mines |
Developing a Knowledge-Sharing Agreement with the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation Government |
Overall runner-up
| Name | Department | Project |
| Vinayak Sharma | Management |
Exeter Open Research Awards 2024
We are pleased to announce the results of our Open Research Awards 2024. The Awards showcase and reward the very best of student-lead open research practices across all of our departments and faculties.
This year we had remarkable entries from across the university highlighting the incredible work our students are producing.
We convened a panel comprising last year’s winners to adjudicate the awards. They were: Han Wu, Zahra Jafari, Rhian Hopkins, Caitlin Kight, and Laura Guedemann. We would like to thank the panel for the excellent job they did.
We would also like to thank everyone who submitted their work for consideration. It is wonderful to see such innovative, thoughtful, and reliable research being submitted from across the university.
The panel are delighted to announce the following winners. In recognition of the high quality of the submissions we have also highly commended a number of case studies. Congratulations all! Vouchers will be given to all overall winners as well as those highly commended case studies.
Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy winner
| Name | Project |
| Liam Berrisford | Operationalizing and Democratizing Ambient Air Pollution Data and Analytics |
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences winner
| Name | Project |
|
Bethany Voller |
Advancing the field of multimorbidity research via openness and reproducibility practices |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences winner
| Name | Project |
|
Aditti Dutta |
Is open and reproducible research possible for online sexism? |
Highly Commended
| Name | Project |
| Nathanael Sheehan (ESE) | Philosophy of Open Science: A Meta-Scientific Study on Global Health Data Practices |
| Fay Kahane (ESE) | What is sustainable beekeeping and how can / should we do it? |
| Jack Gregory (HLS) | CryptoClassifier: an open-source automated ImageJ analysis pipeline for Cryptococcus microscopy image analysis |
Exeter Open Research Awards 2023
This year we had remarkable entries from across the university highlighting the incredible work our students are producing.
We convened a panel to adjudicate the awards who were: Prof Mark Kelson (chair), Dr Eilis Hannon, Prof Gavin Buckingham, Dr Janice Ranson, Sofia Fernandes, and Dr Travis Coan.
The panel are delighted to announce the following winners. The overall winners in each faculty will receive vouchers for £1,500 while the runners up in each faculty will receive £500 in vouchers each. In recognition of the high quality of the submissions we have also highly commended a number of case studies. Congratulations all!
We would like to thank all of the applicants for their engagement with Open Science and wish you all well in your future work.
Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy winners
| Name | Project |
| Jakob Wessel (overall ESE winner) | ibicus – an open-source Python package for the bias adjustment of climate models and associated evaluation. |
| Federica Rescigno | Towards shared data analysis pipelines for robust machine learning techniques |
| Han Wu | Is Deep Learning secure for Robots? |
| Dugald Foster | The Great Meta-Analytic Maze: Tackling Forking Paths and Researcher Degrees of Freedom in Eleven Meta-Analyses |
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences winners
| Name | Project |
|
Rhian Hopkins/Pedro Cardoso/Laura Guedemann (overall HLS winner) |
Improving reproducibility and transparency of diabetes research with electronic health care records |
|
Catherine Russon |
Diametrics: an open-source Python package and web application for analysing diabetes data |
|
Rebecca Padget |
Guppies in large groups cooperate more frequently in an experimental test of the group size paradox. |
|
Xinran Du |
Open Science practices benefit researchers and community |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences winners
| Name | Project |
|
Caitlin Kight (overall HASS winner) |
Building confidence through appreciative self-study -- individually, and in community |
|
Maddy Millar |
Enhancing reproducibility through the implementation and communication of pre-registration: a case study at the intersection of Law and Psychology |
|
Zahra Jafari |
Bibliography and Library of Hussaini Studies in European Languages |
Highly Commended
| Name | Project |
|
Fu Wang |
Towards Verifying the Geometric Robustness of Large-scale Neural Networks |
|
Tobit Dehnen |
Open and reproducible PhD on the social life of vulturine guineafowl |
|
George Hancock |
Tools for camouflage evolution and measuring geometry of habitats |
|
Nathanael Sheehan |
Philosophy of Open Science |
|
Babak Zolghadr-Asli |
Maximizing the benefits of desalinated seawater supply networks for agricultural sustainability |
|
Ian Burton |
Use of machine learning in multiple public policy domains to ensure rigor of research and accountability of decision-makers using said research |
|
Abhra Chaudhuri |
Multi-View Representation Learning in Computer Vision |
|
Molly Kressler |
Diving into Open Research: contributions of a marine scientist |
| Yunus Abakay | Publication in Arabic (Subjects in Contested Spaces: Securitisation of Kurdish Langauge in Syria) |
| Dragos Mitrofan | Developing Open access in archaeology-challenges encountered at the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC) 2023 (Exeter, 27th-29th April) |
| Lara Fricke | Journal Article "Insisting on Uniqueness: Shame and Guilt in German Memory Culture and the denial of Palestinian Perspectives |