New York | London | Berlin | Tokyo — November 21, 2024 — Sony Group Corporation (Sony) and Nature today announced the shortlist for the Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature. From this shortlist, three Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature awardees will be selected to receive the prize. The winners will be announced on February 5, 2025 at an award ceremony in Tokyo.

Launched in March 2024, The Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature will recognize outstanding early to mid-career researchers from the field of technology with a prize of $250,000 USD each to support their research and accelerate achievements that will drive positive impact in the world.
In its inaugural year, the award received high-caliber applications from a multidisciplinary pool of researchers located across the globe who are spearheading technological breakthroughs for the betterment of society. The following seven researchers were identified by an independent judging panel as the strongest candidates for the award, evaluated on the merits of ambition, innovation, conceptual excellence, impact, and social significance.

<Shortlist>

Kiana Aran, University of California San Diego, USA

Dr. Kiana Aran, Professor of Bioengineering and Medicine at the University of California San Diego, is pioneering the integration of modern electronics with biology to develop technologies for precision medicine. She has received numerous engineering and product awards, including honors from the US National Academy of Inventors. She co-founded Cardea, later acquired for its graphene biosensors, and co-founded CRISPR QC to enhance gene-editing precision. An advocate for diversity, she established a non-profit to mentor women engineers and promotes international scientific collaboration.

Hatice Gunes, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Dr. Hatice Gunes is a Full Professor of Affective Intelligence and Robotics and the director of the AFAR Lab at the University of Cambridge's Department of Computer Science and Technology. She spearheads award-winning research on multimodal, social, and affective intelligence for AI systems, particularly embodied agents and robots, by cross-fertilizing research in the fields of Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Human Nonverbal Behavior Understanding. She is a Fellow of the EPSRC, Staff Fellow of Trinity Hall, a former Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, and a former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing.

Jiawen Li, University of Adelaide, Australia

Dr. Jiawen Li is a highly adaptable biomedical engineer leading the intravascular imaging program at the University of Adelaide as an Associate Professor. She received her bachelor's degree from Zhejiang University in 2010, and her Ph.D. from the University of California Irvine in 2015. Her innovations have led to her being selected as Fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council, National Heart Foundation and L'Oréal-UNESCO, and winning numerous prestigious honors.

Xiaona Li, Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, China

Dr. Xiaona Li is the Associate Professor at Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo in China. She leads a collaborative and innovative research team in the fields of halide solid electrolytes and all-solid-state batteries. Her laboratory research aims to expand the technical route of the halide system in all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries by developing a new generation of halide solid electrolyte materials and elucidating the mechanisms of solid-state ion conduction, significantly improving the performance of all-solid-state power batteries.

Amanda Randles, Duke University, USA

Dr. Amanda Randles is the Alfred Winborne Mordecai and Victoria Stover Mordecai Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Duke University, with expertise in high performance computing, machine learning, and personalized modeling for disease diagnostics and treatment. She is an ACM Prize in Computing, NIH Pioneer Award, and NSF CAREER Award recipient. Randles received her Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard and, prior to graduate school, worked at IBM on the Blue Gene supercomputing team.

Yating Wan, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Dr. Yating Wan is an Assistant Professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), specializing in Silicon Photonics with a focus on integrating on-chip light sources. She has made significant contributions to Si CMOS-compatible light sources through her research at the Intel® Research Center on heterogeneously integrated quantum dot lasers. Wan's work aims to advance the efficiency and application of photonic technologies in communication and computing.

Ying Wu, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Dr. Ying Wu received her Bachelor's degree in Physics from Nanjing University, China, in 2002 and her Ph.D. from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2008. Following postdoctoral research, she joined the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, progressing from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor (2017) and Full Professor (2024). Her research centers on designing artificial materials to manipulate wave behaviors, including sound isolation, radiation control, and energy absorption.

For more information about the finalists, visit: Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature Official website

<Comments from the Judging Panel>

Co-chair Dame Stephanie Shirley CH

"True technological progress requires contributions from diverse perspectives. While gender representation in technological fields has improved since I began my career as an IT entrepreneur in the 1960s, we still have a long way to go. As co-chair of the judges' panel, I was very impressed by the quality of applications received and am thrilled to congratulate these finalists."

Hiroaki Kitano, Senior Executive Vice President and CTO, Sony Group Corporation

"We launched this award with Nature to honor and support women researchers pursuing ground-breaking research and technology that will help civilization thrive. In particular, it was exciting to see many novel, multidisciplinary approaches to tackling real-world problems. We are honored that so many exceptional researchers submitted compelling applications from all over the world in the first year of the award's existence and look forward to championing the honorees as they achieve new milestones."

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