In 2021 we launched the Convergence Health and Technology Open Research Award, which was a collaborative effort between the Convergence Alliance, Rotterdam R.I.O.T. Science Club, Open Science Community Rotterdam, and Open Science Community Delft. These awards are aimed at rewarding researchers who are adopting open research practices in healthcare and technology. Open research practices improve transparency, openness, reproducibility, and replicability, essential to achieving quality research.

We received many wonderful nominations, a testament of the fact that open science practices are becoming mainstream. Many thanks to all nominees!

We had the pleasure to award 12 outstanding researchers – working at Erasmus MC, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and TU Delft – who demonstrated great commitment to open research in several ways, from excellent preregistrations to publicly shared software and datasets. Award winners will receive an invitation to the award ceremony and further instructions to collect their award within the upcoming weeks.

We are delighted to announce our award winners from all institutions:

Erasmus MC

Martijn Starmans

Martijn is a PhD candidate at Erasmus MC who has viewed Open Science as one of his core values since the start of his PhD. In his PhD he has publicly shared a large medical imaging dataset, created open source software toolboxes, and published the majority of his work open access. In addition to these efforts, he tries motivating others to work following Open Science principles, for example by advocating the use of publicly available data and software in courses that he teaches.

Kimberlin van Wijnen

Kimberlin is a PhD candidate at Erasmus MC working in the field of deep learning for medical image analysis. She goes out of her way to adopt Open Research practices, as she views Open Science as a way of facilitating and stimulating inclusiveness and collaboration. She co-organized a challenge to facilitate the development of automated methods to identify neuroimaging markers for cerebral small vessel disease, for which she prepared a dataset that was released online. The accompanying code for the evaluation was also released.

Sebastiaan van der Voort

Sebastiaan is a postdoctoral researcher at Erasmus MC who works on applying artificial intelligence to the analysis of MRI scans of patients with glioma. Given that reproducibility and replicability of AI findings are highly dependent on the training data, he viewed making all his published work, as well as accompanying code and data, publicly available as a cornerstone of moving his field forward. Especially noteworthy is the fact that he shared the largest publicly available dataset containing MRI scans of patients with glioma.

Brandon Rasman

Brandon is a PhD candidate at Erasmus MC, who firmly believes that the benefits of science are contingent upon accessible and transparent research and carries this mindset into his scientific endeavors. In his PhD he has contributed to research projects from the European Space Agency in which knowledge translation was a core theme. In this project, progress was shared with the public and experiments were partially filmed and broadcasted through media outlets. Additionally, he has published work open access and made accompanying code publicly available.

Erasmus University Rotterdam

Anne Bülow

Anne is a PhD-candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam who has adopted Open Science practices in each step of the empirical cycle. She also motivated supervisors and scholars around her to embrace these principles, for example by giving a workshop on pre-registration. She has also preregistered three datasets and six scientific articles. She publishes all her work open access and shared accompanying information such as her code and the questionnaires used.

Max Welz

Max is a PhD candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam working in the field of statistical methodology for health applications. He publicly shares open-source software code and aims to share his experiences with the broader scientific community. He has shared his scientific output in the form of preprints and open code.

Michelle Achterberg

Michelle is a postdoctoral researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She has been a pioneer in sharing neuroimaging data under the GDPR regulations – e.g., she shares her data via Neurovault to reuse in meta-analyses –, and she contributed to a guide to share brain MRI data following GDPR. Further, she has a drive for making societal impact by giving lectures to the general public, for example for the Dutch educational TV show TopDoks. Lastly, all of her first-authored publications are published open access, for which she has also been sharing all of her code since 2019. With all these efforts, she hopes to inspire other early career researchers to incorporate Open Science principles into their work.

Jannis Stöckel & Sebastian Himmler

Jannis and Sebastian are PhD candidates at Erasmus University Rotterdam who have collaborated on an open access publication. Accompanying their publication, they have publicly shared a replication package that includes all underlying code and a detailed set of instructions with annotated source files. Additionally, both Jannis and Sebastian have written blog posts (e.g., on the OSCR website) aimed at popularizing the added benefit of the use of Open Science practices in health economics.

TU Delft

Qian He

Qian is a master student at TU Delft who works in the area of Social design for Artificial Intelligence in eHealth services. During her master’s degree, she worked on a publication that was published open access and included a highly transparent coding tree for the handling of qualitative data.

Joris Verhagen

Joris is a master student at TU Delft who is passionate about contributing to a broader community by sharing code and experience. In the lab where Joris has stayed as a research assistant, he is the first master student to ever have contributed to an ongoing open software tool.

Leila Iñigo de la Cruz

Leila is a PhD candidate at TU Delft with a drive for using Open Science practices. She has strongly advocated for the use of Open Science practices in her lab, by for example providing training in the use of GitHub to collaborators and lab members. She has also publicly shared code and documentation for workflows that she used in her publications, and made her research outputs available in the form of preprints.

Pavlo Bazilinskyy

Pavlo is a postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft working in the fast-paced field of driver safety of automated vehicles. He advocates that, given that the general public is the future user of automated driving, it is crucial to involve the general public in every step of this development. Through this philosophy he has used crowdsourced data to derive conclusions that have provided counter points to well-cited scientific outputs in his field that were based on much smaller sample sizes. He has made all his data publicly available to encourage others to use online crowdsourcing as a potential tool for their scientific endeavors.