ARDC-Sponsored Awards and Prizes
Groundbreaking research depends on such enablers as research software and data platforms. The real-word impact they create is immense, and yet too often they go unnoticed.
The ARDC is proud to sponsor awards and prizes that shine a spotlight on these ever more important ingredients for moden research, and celebrate people at all career stages that work tirelessly to build and maintain them.
Awards Now Open
Sponsored by the ARDC, the Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Excellence in Data Platforms is awarded for the development, maintenance or extension of a data platform that has enabled significant new scientific research.
For the purpose of this prize, “data platform” refers to an online platform that provides data for researchers and other users to access and use for their research. The data provided is as open as possible and closed where necessary.
2026 timeline
- Entries open: Monday 9 February 2026
- Entries close: 7 pm (AEST), Thursday 16 April 2026
- Finalists announced: Wednesday 29 July 2026
- Winner(s) announced at Award Ceremony: Thursday 3 September 2026
Further information
Learn more about this award on the Australian Museum website.
Also read:
The Ecological Society of Australia (ESA) has an ARDC-sponsored award for New Developers of Open Source Software in Ecology. It aims to support efforts to develop and share methodology, models and data in ecology and management of Australia’s ecological communities. It will also focus on supporting researchers new to software development.
2026 timeline
- Entries open: Sunday 1 March 2026
- Entries close: Sunday 31 May 2026
Previous winners
- 2025: Dr Elizabeth Wenk
- 2024: Dr Juergen Knauer
- 2023: Dr Roozbeh Valavi
- 2022: Dr Fonti Kar
Further information
Learn more about this award on the ESA website.
Awards to be Announced
The Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) has an Emerging Leaders in Astronomy Software Development Prize, sponsored by the ARDC and CSIRO (from 2026), for early-career researchers (ECRs) who have produced or contributed to new open-source astronomy software.
Previous winners
- 2025: Dr Joshua Preston Pritchard
- 2024: Dr Kate Harborne
- 2023: Dr Manodeep Sinha
Further information
Learn more about this award on the ASA website.
Past Awards
Sponsored and presented by the ARDC, the Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Excellence in Research Software is awarded for the development, maintenance or extension of software that has enabled significant new scientific research.
2025 winner and finalists
Previous winners and finalists
2024
- Winner: Professor Gordon Smyth
- Finalists:
MiniZinc,MRtrix3
2023
- Winners: Dr Minh Bui and Professor Robert Lanfear
- Finalists:
GPlates,mixOmics
This award from Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society (ABACBS) recognised bioinformaticians from the Australian community who provide outstanding levels of support and maintenance for widely used bioinformatics software. This award aims to promote efforts amongst our community members to document, maintain and support high-quality bioinformatics software.
Winners
- 2023: Dr Juan Nunez-Iglesias (read our 2022 interview with him)
- 2022: Catherine Bromhead
Further information
Learn more about this award on the ABACBS website.
This award from the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society (ABACBS) recognised outstanding early- and mid-career researcher (EMCR) bioinformatics software developer from the Australian community with a view to promoting further efforts to develop and share bioinformatics methodologies.
Winners
- 2023: Dr Ryan Wick
- 2022: Dr Michael Roach
Further information
Learn more about this award on the ABACBS website.
This award from the Statistical Society of Australia (SSA) Bill Venables Award recognised new developers of open source software for data analytics.
2024 winners
Two developers shared this year’s award:
- Alex Lee for his software
whereabouts, a light-weight Python package for bulk geocoding and address standardization - Rob Moss for his software
pypfilt, which implements several online inference methods that have been used in many scientific fields for real-time forecasting, with the COVID-19 pandemic being one of the most high-profile examples.
Read about Alex’s and Rob’s work.
Previous winners
- 2023: Matthew Sainsbury-Dale, Andrew Zammit-Mangion
- 2022: Dr Lydia Lucchesi and Sam Nelson and the Vizumap team
Further information
Learn more about this award on the SSA website.
Start planning your submission now!
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