Top Three Tweets – #uberresearchprize

At the beginning of the month, alongside the ÜberResearch team, we launched a Twitter competition open to PhD students.

Why you may ask? Back in June, ÜberResearch were selected as one of the two winners of the Research Visualisation contest from the British Library, AHRC and BBSRC. They decided to donate their £2,000 prize winnings to a PhD, so they can be equipped with a brand-new MacBook Pro, fully stocked with a years Premium Figshare account, a pro license for Readcube, and a Projects license.

Kicking things off on Twitter, we encouraged PhD students to tweet using the hashtag #uberresearchprize how they would spend £10 million of science funding.

Over the last two weeks we have been overwhelmed by all of the tweets. One of the things you may notice, is there seems to be a few common themes amongst these tweets – something that we didn’t expect. This also meant choosing our top three was a difficult task. But we managed it, with thanks to our judging panel including Christian Herzog from ÜberResearch, Allan Sudlow from the British Library, Timo Hannay and Laura Wheeler from Digital Science.

Here they are:

#uberresearchprize I would spend the money on building open innovation centers where people can do freelance biotech for a small fee.

— Darin Weed (@darinweed) July 2, 2014

£10 million on establishing an academic structure that has permanent positions for non-PI, post-doctoral researchers #uberresearchprize

— Kevin Rattigan (@specialKevKev) July 3, 2014

#uberresearchprize more opportunities for young scientists to experience research and the lab – to attract the next gen of scientists

— Izzy Webb (@isabelwebb) July 14, 2014

Christian Herzog from ÜberResearch elaborates:

“This question, of how to allocate £10 million of funding is a serious challenge that our clients (science funders) struggle with everyday. Our hope was to get insights from PhD students who provide a fresh perspective on research challenges and opportunities. 

The three selected finalists addressed specific aspects or gaps in the current research landscape: Izzy wants to inspire future researchers by experiencing the lab earlier, Kevin suggests positions for post doctoral researchers – allowing them to focus on their science and less on their career, and Darin suggests to create research facilities for freelance researchers outside of the traditional research organizations. We are looking forward to the next step in our contest – three corresponding blog posts exploring these ideas in more detail from our finalists!”

We would like to echo Christian’s comment, we are looking forward to the final blog posts, delving into the tweets in more detail – so stay tuned.