Welcome to October! Everything is pumpkin-spiced, and our attentions have turned to awards, as October not only heralds the closing date of this year’s Catalyst Grant program, but it is also the month that the Nobel Prize winners will be announced. Awards and prizes are a great way of incentivising innovation, but there are also challenges. People who win awards tend to win more awards in the future. Even putting yourself forward for self-nominated awards falls along the lines of privilege and confidence. And even if you win awards, there is no guarantee that it will have a positive impact on your research career as measured by traditional metrics of success. How can we diversify the talents we celebrate and support, and ensure that no groundbreaking discoveries are overlooked, in order to truly tackle the global challenges we are facing as a society? This is something I chatted about with Dr Gilbert De Gregorio, Associate Director of the Frontiers Planetary Prize when we caught up at the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin in November 2023.
You can watch the full interview with Glbert on our YouTube channel, and check out our Speaker Series playlist on YouTube which includes chats with some of our previous speakers, as well as our TL;DR Shorts playlist with short, snappy insights from a range of experts on the topics that matter to the research community.
With thanks to Huw James from Science Story Lab for filming and co-producing this interview.
