First social sciences winners of young researcher awards

For the first time, researchers in the social sciences and humanities are among the winners of the European Young Researchers Award, presented at ESOF 2016.

The 2016 European Young Researchers Awards for postdoctoral researchers were awarded at the EuroScience Open Forum in Manchester on 25 July to Marta Entradas of the Centre for Socioeconomic and Territorial Studies in Lisbon, Portugal, and to Martijn Wieling of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The 2015 award for a PhD student, also made at ESOF 2016, went to Heike Blockus, now at Columbia University in the USA and formerly of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France.

Blockus won the PhD award for her research into how certain genes cause the brains of different mammal species to differentiate, while Entradas won hers for research into the science communication strategies of research institutes and Wieling won his for looking at quantitative variations in language acquisition. Entradas and Wieling are the first social sciences and humanities researchers to have won the award, which is presented by EuroScience, since it was established in 2010.