The Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists today announced the Finalists for the 2026 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom. The Awards recognise scientific advances by UK researchers across Life Sciences, Chemical Sciences, and Physical Sciences & Engineering. Now in its ninth year, each Blavatnik Awards Laureate will receive an unrestricted £100,000 (US$135,000) prize, while the remaining six Finalists will be awarded £30,000 (US$40,400) each. 

This year’s Finalists include:

Chemical Sciences Finalists

Michael J. Booth, PhD – University College London (UCL)

Mathew H. Horrocks, PhD – The University of Edinburgh

Maxie M. Roessler, DPhil – Imperial College London

Life Sciences Finalists

Nicholas R. Casewell, PhD – Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

Thi Hoang Duong (Kelly) Nguyen, PhD – MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Pontus Skoglund, PhD – The Francis Crick Institute

Physical Sciences & Engineering Finalists

Radha Boya, PhD – The University of Manchester

Paola Pinilla, PhD – University College London (UCL)

Iestyn Woolway, PhD – Bangor University

Researchers have demonstrated, for the first time, that transfer learning can significantly enhance material Z-class identification in muon tomography, even in scenarios with limited or completely unlabeled data. Led by Professor Liangwen Chen, the team developed lightweight neural network models that achieve over 96% overall accuracy—and nearly 99% accuracy for high-Z materials—when detecting shielded objects, paving the way for practical applications of transfer learning in nuclear security and inspection technologies.

Researchers have proposed a method for ⁹⁹Mo production via electron accelerator irradiation of a natural-uranium-bearing liquid molten salt target. This approach offers significant advantages, including low nuclear proliferation risk, online extraction capability, and low construction costs. Consequently, it provides a viable pathway for stable, large-scale ⁹⁹Mo production.

A research team from Nanjing University has developed an in-situ on-device electrochemical intercalation method to manipulate the structural and electronic properties of MoS₂ thin flakes, resulting in a robust nonlinear Hall effect (NLHE) observable at room temperature. By intercalating cetyltrimethylammonium ions (CTA⁺) into the van der Waals (vdW) gap of MoS₂, the inversion symmetry is broken and NLHE can be observed up to 300 K. This work provides a new approach for regulating NLHE and symmetry in 2D materials and opens new avenues for designing new electronic and spintronic devices.

The research team of Weihong Tan, Xiaohong Fang, and Tao Bing from the Hangzhou Institute of Medical Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, proposed a new method for nucleic acid aptamer sequence analysis based on machine learning. This method can directly parse the secondary structure of nucleic acid aptamers from single-round screening data, thereby obtaining detailed secondary structure information of nucleic acid aptamers without iterative enrichment. This enables rational truncation and optimization of high-affinity nucleic acid aptamers, and even the design of nucleic acid aptamer molecules, significantly accelerating the discovery and optimization process of nucleic acid aptamers. The article was published as an open access Research Article in CCS Chemistry, the flagship journal of the Chinese Chemical Society.