Tommaso Ciarli and Ismael Rafols received the Atlas Award from Elsevier for their research on research priorities and societal demands.
The Atlas Award has been granted for their article “The relation between research priorities and societal demands: The case of rice”. The article compares research efforts related to rice against statistics of rice demand across countries, as explained in this interview. Tommaso Ciarli is a Senior Research Fellow at SPRU (University of Sussex) and Ismael Rafols is a Senior Researcher at CWTS (Leiden University).
The article has been selected from thousands of recently published articles across Elsevier’s 3,800 journals. Atlas articles showcase research that impacts people’s lives around the world in the hope that bringing wider attention to this research will go some way to ensuring its successful implementation.
To celebrate this award, SPRU is organising a panel debate that will examine ‘The relation between research and societal needs’ on 22nd of May 2020. This topic links with the STRINGS project, in which the two researchers are involved and which aims to map the complex relations between research in Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) on the one hand and the Sustainable Development Goals on the other.
This work is part of the research agenda of the Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (STIS) group, which examines the relationship between research trajectories, innovation and societal challenges such as food production and nutrition. STIS has recently published similar studies, examining research efforts against disease burden, research priority setting after the avian flu pandemic outbreak or the different research agendas for addressing obesity.