Congratulations to our No-Bell Prize winners!

Congratulations to the winners of the 2026 No-Bell Prize: Laura Conlon, Lea Lim, Skye Holmwood and Ramin Ghasemishayan!

Above: No-Bell Prize finalists, from left to right: Lea Lim (Runner up), Ramin Ghasemishayan (People's Choice), Sky Holmwood (Runner up), Yeganeh Khazaei, Mariia Ptukha, Adren Alinejad, Priya Kumar, Aaron Walton, Mohammadamin Sabbaghalvani, Assia Comella, Lora Stier, Laura Conlon (Winner).

We were honoured to host the Faculty-wide competition at MSPS this year, which culminated in a final event on 1 October.

12 of the Faculty’s best and brightest graduate researchers introduced their research projects in just 90 seconds, with no slides or additional props. Our judges and audience then had the opportunity to ask questions for another 3 minutes – all while our finalists tried to avoid using any jargon.

With such a wide range of research projects and the exceptional calibre of presentations, our judges had quite a task to decide on this year’s winners. Laura Conlon, one of our PhD candidates at MSPS took out he top honours with her presentation, ‘Apples, Bad Apples, and Oranges: Assessing study quality in meta-analysis’. Lea Lim (Melbourne School of Health Sciences, Optometry & Vision Sciences) and Skye Holmwood (Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health) were runners up with their presentations ‘Seeing in the Dark: A New Way to Test Vision’ and ‘Uncovering a new villain in Alzheimer's Disease’. The People’s Choice, as voted by the afternoon’s attendees, was Ramin Ghasemishayan (Melbourne Medical School, Department of Radiology) with ‘The Brain's Night Shift’.

A huge thank you to our host, Professor Christobel Saunders; our wonderful judges for the day, Professor Justine Mintern, Professor Bang Bui and Dr Rachael Moses; time-keeper and communications coach Emma Donnelly; and the No-Bell Prize organising committee – Associate Professor Charles Malpas, Mairéad Murray, Gemma Papprill and Celia Harvey. And of course, well done to everyone who entered the competition or presented at the final – we thoroughly enjoyed learning about your fantastic research!