The Einstein Foundation Berlin awards 350,000 € prize to advance research quality

The Einstein Foundation Berlin honors the Australian psychologist Simine Vazire, the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative, and the project Erring Rigorously with the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research 2025. The latter project receives the Early Career Award for exploring how experimental errors shape genomic data, developing tools to make analyses more accurate and reproducible. The award is bestowed jointly with the QUEST Center for Responsible Research at the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) at Charité.

The €350,000 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research honors researchers and institutions whose work helps to fundamentally advance the quality and robustness of research findings. The recipient of this year’s Individual Award, Simine Vazire, is a psychologist at University of Melbourne and editor-in-chief of Psychological Science. She is recognized for pioneering methodological rigor, reproducibility, and collaborative research in psychology, shaping initiatives such as the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) and the journal Collabra. This year’s Institutional Award honors a nationwide effort to systematically evaluate research results in laboratory biology. The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative is the largest coordinated replication effort in the field worldwide, showcasing the transformative potential of country-level research improvement efforts. The Early Career Award comes with funding of €100,000, enabled by BIH QUEST Center for Responsible Research, and goes to the project “Erring Rigorously” by Maximilian Sprang, bioinformatician at the Medical Center of the University of Mainz. The project quantifies the impact of errors in high-throughput sequencing and, by distinguishing true biological signals from technical artifacts, aims to improve reproducibility and data reliability in functional genomics.

“The 2025 awardees demonstrate that improving research quality is both possible and powerful: through pioneering leadership, coordinated national reform, and rigorous methodological innovation,” says Ulrich Dirnagl, FoundingDirector of the QUEST Centerat BIHand Award Secretary. “Their achievements strengthen the foundations of reliable, transparent science worldwide.”

Christopher Baum, Chair of the Board of Directors of the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, says: “Erring Rigorously sharpens the line between real biological signals and technical noise — boosting data reliability in line with the Einstein Foundation Award’s goals and the Berlin Institute of Health’s commitment to patient-centered, reproducible, transparent science.”

The new call for international nominations and applications for the Einstein Foundation Award 2026 will be published in January 2026 at award.einsteinfoundation.de.

 


Press Contact

Mirjam Kaplow
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Phone: +49 (0)30 450 543 343
E-Mail: pressestelle-bih[at]bih-charite.de

 

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