Swiss Open Research Data prize acknowledges Nicola Marzari

The Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences have awarded the National ORD Prize for the first time on 6 December 2023. This new prize acknowledges researchers at all career levels for innovative practices in the field of open research data (ORD) and aims to take the shift towards open research data forward. 

The theme of the 2023 National ORD Prize was “The re-use of research data”.  It acknowledges projects that either re-use data from other projects or make their own data available in such a way that other researchers can conduct further work with it.

MARVEL Director Nicola Marzari was among the four researchers who received a special acknowledgement from the jury, for the project “Novel two-dimensional materials from computational exfoliation of all known inorganic compounds”, that involved several other MARVEL members at EPFL as well as Giovanni Pizzi, now at the Paul Scherrer Institut. 

During the 6 December ceremony, that was live-streamed, the Gold Prize was awarded to Adriano Rutz, a Postdoc in molecular systems biology at ETH Zurich, for “The LOTUS Initiative”, a bioinformatics open science database that contains over 750,000 referenced structure-organism pairs. The Silver Prize went to Hans-Peter Schaub, a Senior Researcher at the University of Bern’s Institute of Political Science, for the “Swissvotes” project that makes data on Swiss referendums from 1848 to the present day freely accessible. The winners of the Bronze Prize were Yvonne Fuchs, coordinator of the Data Stewardship Programme at the University of Lucerne, and  Dominic Weber, a doctoral researcher in history at the University of Bern, for their “transcriptiones” project that gives access to transcriptions of historical manuscript sources and their metadata. 

Together with Marzari, three other researchers received a special mention: Emmanouil Barmpounakis (Postdoc/Environmental Sciences, also at EPFL) for “pNEUMA: On the New Era of Urban traffic Models with massive empirical data from Aerial footage”; Marvin Höge (Research Assistant, Systems Analysis and Modelling, Water Research Institute of the ETH Domain Eawag) for “CAMELS-CH: Catchment attributes and hydro-meteorological time series for large-sample studies across hydrologic Switzerland”; and Damien Ségransan (Professor, Astronomy, University of Geneva) for “DACE: Data and Analysis Center for Exoplanets”. 

The National ORD Prize is part of the National Action Plan for “Open Research Data”, which the Swiss Academies are helping to implement in the scope of the National Strategy for Open Research Data. Open Research Data fosters transparency, reproducibility and collaboration in the scientific and academic community.