ONS Research Excellence Awards 2024: Meet the winners

The winners of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Research Excellence Awards 2024 were announced on Wednesday 4 December in an online celebration event. The awards recognise excellent and innovative analyses carried out using secure data, and promote best practice research methodologies and data matching or linking.Meet this year’s winners:

ADR UK Research Excellence Award

For the first time, this year’s categories included an ADR UK Research Excellence Award, celebrating innovative and impactful research funded by ADR UK. The winner was:

Dr Kitty Lymperopoulou, University of Plymouth

Project title: Ethnic inequalities in the criminal justice system

This research addresses knowledge gaps on wide ethnic disparities in the Criminal Justice System highlighted in recent government reports. It provides evidence on the extent and drivers of ethnic disparities, identifying effective ways of addressing them.

Kitty’s research was carried out as part of an ADR UK Research Fellowship, using data made available through the Ministry of Justice Data First programme. Read more about her research in her Data Insight and data comic.

Impact of Analysis Award

Dr Katie Hunter, Manchester Metropolitan University

Project title: Understanding the intersections between ethnicity, care experience and youth justice involvement

This project explores how children who have been in out-of-home care and children from racially minoritised backgrounds are disproportionately drawn into the youth justice system in England.

Katie’s research was carried out as part of an ADR UK Research Fellowship, using the Ministry of Justice & Department for Education linked dataset – England. Read more about Katie’s research in her policy briefing.

Allen Joseph and Whitney Crenna-Jennings, Education Policy Institute

Project title: Early adult outcomes for suspended and excluded pupils

This research demonstrates that young people who are suspended during secondary school experience a range of poorer outcomes in late adolescence and early adulthood compared with their peers.

Impact of Analysis Award – Collaboration with Government

Christina Palmou (ONS), Jakob Schneebacher (Competition and Markets Authority) and Thiemo Fetzer (University of Warwick)

Project title: How do firms cope with economic shocks in real time?

This work builds a new toolbox, of high-frequency linked microdata, to estimate firm responses to economic shocks in near real-time.

Secure Data Creation Award

The ECHILD Team, Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health at University College London

Project title: Education and Child Health Insights from Linked Data (ECHILD)

The ECHILD project has enabled linkage of multi-agency data, to provide a more holistic understanding of children's lives and how they interact with services spanning health, education and social care.

ECHILD is an ADR England flagship dataset, which is now securely available for accredited researchers to apply to access.

Organisational Excellence Award

The DRAGoN Team, University of the West of England Bristol

Project title: Data Research, Access and Governance Network (DRAGoN)

This is a multi-disciplinary research group that aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, think-tanks, industry and government. They aim to improve tools, operations and skills in relation to output checking in trusted research environments.

ONS People's Choice Award

The Virus Watch Team, University College London

Project title: Virus Watch

This work led to the creation of a new linked dataset in 2020, that provides evidence on which public health approaches are most effective in reducing transmission of Covid-19. The dataset also enables investigation of community incidence, symptoms, and transmission of the virus, in relation to population movement and behaviours.

Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees. To learn more, visit the ONS website.