Meet the winners of the 2026 Arqus Awards!

The Arqus Annual Conference in Maynooth provided the perfect setting to celebrate some of the Alliance’s most inspiring achievements. During the Arqus 2026 Awards Ceremony, outstanding initiatives in Open Science, Innovation and Teaching Excellence were recognised, showcasing the creativity, collaboration and commitment that continue to shape the Arqus community.

The Alliance extends its sincere thanks to everyone who submitted their projects. The exceptional quality of the applications made this year’s selection particularly competitive and reflected the wealth of talent across our partner universities. Discover the winners of the 2026 Arqus Awards below.

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Teaching Excellence Awards

The Arqus Teaching Excellence Award is a prestigious accolade that recognizes educators within Arqus who demonstrate innovation and excellence in their teaching practices.

This award celebrates initiatives that foster inclusive, student-centered learning environments, promote research-informed teaching approaches, and empower students from diverse backgrounds to thrive in dynamic educational settings. 

The 2026 edition winners are:

• Paulo Flores (left): Department of Mechanical Engineering (University of Minho) for his course Integrated Project in Mechanical Engineering – the Race Party Challenge
  
• Marina García Carmona & Pedro Jesús Ruiz Montero (right): for their coordinated teaching initiative Service-Learning Methodology in Contexts of Diversity: Inclusive Education, Social Justice, and Physical Activity and Sport (University of Granada)

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Open Science Awards

The Open Science Awards celebrate those who set an example for the entire Arqus scientific community by advancing accessibility, reusability and reproducibility in research.

The call was open to early-career researchers (PhD students or early postdocs) from Arqus member universities who had extensively applied open science practices in their research, participated in a citizen science project, or developed open-source tools or software.

Open Science Awards Winners

The 2026 edition winners are:

• Davide Tedesco (left): Department of Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Padua – Supervisor: Paolo Zavagna – Category: “Innovative Open Science Approaches” for his work on electroacoustic music preservation

• Ambra Perugini (centre): Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation, University of Padua – Supervisor: Massimiliano Pastore – Category: “Open Software, Hardware & Infrastructure” for the criticalESvalue package in R

• Adam Coates (right): Department of Psychology, University of Graz – Supervisor: Natalia Zaretskaya – Category:  “Peer-Reviewed Research” for the article High-resolution dataset of manual claustrum segmentation

Open Science Honour Mentions

Given the number of entries submitted, all of which were of an exceptionally high standard, the jury felt it appropriate to award an honourable mention to the following researchers:

• Annina Thaller: Department of Environmental Systems Sciences, University of Graz – Supervisor: Alfred Posch – Category: “Peer-Reviewed Research” for the article Pushing low-carbon mobility: a survey experiment on the public acceptance of disruptive policy packages

• Gavin Farrell: Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Padua – Supervisor: Silvio C. E. Tosatto – Category: “Open Software, Hardware & Infrastructure” for the Open & Sustainable Artificial Intelligence web platform

• Valentin Ghibaudo: Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre, University of Lyon 1 – Supervisor: Baptiste Balanca – Category: “Open Software, Hardware & Infrastructure” for the Physio toolbox in Python

• Jéremy Scanvic: ENS de Lyon, University of Lyon 1 – Supervisor: Julián Tachella – Category: “Open Software, Hardware & Infrastructure” for his role in mantaining and improving the DeepInverse library

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Innovators Awards

The Arqus International Innovators Award is an online competition that looks for selecting the most innovative and internationalized Arqus start-ups.

It is one of the initiatives of the Alliance intended to identify and foster university-based start-ups planning to internationalize very early. The Award allows them to present international business models in order to support visibility and networking on the European level for international venture implementation.

Following a public vote that allowed the audience to choose their favourite team, the winner of the 2026 edition is:

The Arqus Awards continue to celebrate the talent, dedication and collaborative spirit that define the Alliance. By recognising these outstanding initiatives, Arqus reaffirms its commitment to fostering excellence in education, research and innovation across its member universities. Congratulations once again to all the winners and nominees for their valuable contributions to the Arqus community!