Golden Goose Award to be given to Groundbreaking Researchers Next Week

The third annual Golden Goose Award Ceremony will take place on September 18, 2014 on Capitol Hill. Individual or teams of scientists will be awarded the GGA in front of their peers in the scientific community, Members of Congress and their staff, and members of the scientific advocacy and policy community in Washington, DC.

Science correspondent Miles O’Brien will serve
as Master of Ceremonies for the event. APLU is one of nine founding sponsors of the Golden Goose Awards.

The purpose of the Golden Goose award is to demonstrate the human and economic benefits of federally funded research by highlighting examples of seemingly obscure studies that have led to major breakthroughs and resulted in significant societal impact. Such breakthroughs include development of life-saving medicines and treatments; game-changing social and behavioral insights; and major technological advances related to national security, energy, the environment, communications, and public health. Such breakthroughs may also have resulted in economic growth through the creation of new industries or companies.

The 2014 awardees, announced earlier this year, are:

• Larry Smarr, whose basic research on colliding black holes in space led to the development of U.S. supercomputing capabilities and the creation of the first Internet browsers,
• Robert Wilson, Paul Milgrom and R. Preston McAfee, whose basic research on game theory and auctions led to the first auctioning of the spectrum by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1994 and the subsequent rapid advance of the global telecommunications industry, and
• Saul Schanberg, Tiffany Martini Field, Cynthia Kuhn and Gary Evoniuk, whose research found that touch, in the form of infant massage, can vastly improve the outcome for babies born prematurely and has affected millions of lives around the world and saved billions of dollars in healthcare costs in the United States alone.

Additional information about the Golden Goose Award, including previous winners and sponsors, can be found at www.goldengooseaward.org and on Twitter at @GoldGooseAward.