Vilnius University Initiative Wins the Arqus International Innovators Award

The Arqus Annual Conference, held in Maynooth, brought together members of the Alliance to celebrate achievements in education, research and innovation. During the Arqus 2026 Awards Ceremony, winners of the Open Science, Innovation and Teaching Excellence Awards were announced. Among this year’s award recipients was Vilnius University, whose initiative, the Elite Education Academy, received the Arqus International Innovators Award 2026.

Elite Education Academy aims to connect students with long-term teachers through a personalised compatibility test that identifies the best match between learners and educators.

The Arqus International Innovators Award recognises innovative initiatives emerging from Arqus member universities and supports projects with international potential by increasing their visibility and fostering collaboration across Europe.

Alongside the Arqus International Innovators Award, the Arqus 2026 Awards Ceremony also recognised outstanding achievements in teaching excellence and open science.

Teaching Excellence Awards

The Arqus Teaching Excellence Award is a prestigious recognition that celebrates educators within the Alliance who demonstrate innovation and excellence in their teaching practices.

The award highlights initiatives that foster inclusive, student-centred learning environments, promote research-informed teaching approaches and empower students from diverse backgrounds to thrive in dynamic educational settings.

The 2026 Teaching Excellence Award winners are:

Paulo Flores from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minho for his course, Integrated Project in Mechanical Engineering – the Race Party Challenge.
Marina García Carmona and Pedro Jesús Ruiz Montero from the University of Granada for their coordinated teaching initiative, Service-Learning Methodology in Contexts of Diversity: Inclusive Education, Social Justice, and Physical Activity and Sport.

Open Science Awards

The Arqus Open Science Awards recognise researchers who set an example for the wider Arqus scientific community by advancing accessibility, reusability and reproducibility in research.

The call was open to early-career researchers (PhD students and early postdoctoral researchers) from Arqus member universities who had actively applied open science practices in their research, participated in citizen science projects or developed open-source tools and software.

The 2026 Open Science Award winners are:

Davide Tedesco from the Department of Cultural Heritage at the University of Padua (supervisor: Paolo Zavagna) – winner in the category Innovative Open Science Approaches for his work on electroacoustic music preservation.
Ambra Perugini from the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation at the University of Padua (supervisor: Massimiliano Pastore) – winner in the category Open Software, Hardware & Infrastructure for the criticalESvalue package in R.
Adam Coates from the Department of Psychology at the University of Graz (supervisor: Natalia Zaretskaya) – winner in the category Peer-Reviewed Research for the article High-resolution dataset of manual claustrum segmentation.

Due to the exceptionally high standard of submissions, the jury also awarded Open Science Honour Mentions to the following researchers:

Annina Thaller from the Department of Environmental Systems Sciences at the University of Graz (supervisor: Alfred Posch) – in the category Peer-Reviewed Research for the article Pushing low-carbon mobility: a survey experiment on the public acceptance of disruptive policy packages.
Gavin Farrell from the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Padua (supervisor: Silvio C. E. Tosatto) – in the category Open Software, Hardware & Infrastructure for the Open & Sustainable Artificial Intelligence web platform.
Valentin Ghibaudo from the Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre at the University of Lyon 1 (supervisor: Baptiste Balanca) – in the category Open Software, Hardware & Infrastructure for the Physio toolbox in Python.
Jérémy Scanvic from ENS de Lyon at the University of Lyon 1 (supervisor: Julián Tachella) – in the category Open Software, Hardware & Infrastructure for maintaining and improving the DeepInverse library.

The Arqus Awards continue to celebrate the talent, dedication and collaborative spirit that define the Alliance. By recognising these outstanding initiatives, Arqus reaffirms its commitment to fostering excellence in education, research and innovation across its member universities.