Thanks to everyone who helped the 2016 edition of October Madness get started! Today we're announcing the results of our Sweet 16 round and kicking off voting for the Elite 8 round.
Are you new to October Madness? It's a Nobel Prize prediction contest from Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. It's easy: everyone can vote for who they think will win! Refer to our contest announcement for the schedule and prizes.
Voting for this round will be open until 11:59 p.m. PDT on September 11. Check back on this blog or on Sigma Xi's social media on September 13 for the results.
Sweet 16 Voting Results
Chemistry
Economic Sciences
Physics
Physiology or Medicine
Elite 8 Voting
Chemistry
Vote here for your predictions for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The Elite 8 chemistry match-ups are:
1.
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for the CRISPR gene editing tool
VS.
Jerrold Meinwald for his work leading to the establishment of the field of chemical ecology and his fundamental studies of how chemicals act as repellents and attractants between organisms, leading to the use of these chemicals in a variety of biomedical, agricultural,forestry, and household applications
2.
Michael Grätzel for discovering dye sensitized solar cells, a new type of solar cell for powering portable electronic devices with applications for building integrated photovoltaics
VS.
Andrew Holmes for his contributions to chemical synthesis at the interface between materials and biology and pioneering the field of organic electronic materials
3.
Kim Lewis for the discovery of Teixobactin, the first antibiotic in 30 years
VS.
Tobin J. Marks for contributions to understand catalysts, useful in the production of environmentally-friendly plastics and new materials
4.
Paul J. Reider for the discovery and development of approved drugs, including those for treating asthma and for treating AIDS
VS.
Harry Gray, Stephen Lippard, Richard Holm for work in bioinorganic chemistry
Economic Sciences
Vote here for your predictions for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences.
The economic sciences Elite 8 match-ups are:
1.
Jennifer Hunt for analysis on immigration
VS.
Orley Ashenfelter for analysis on labor economics
2.
Daniel Hamermesh for his contributions to the study of labor demand
VS.
Gary S. Fields for contributions on the importance of efficient labor markets to fight poverty and foster economic development in low- and middle-income countries
3.
Richard Blundell for his important contributions to labor economics, public finance, and applied econometrics
VS.
Roland Fryer for ground breaking quantitative analysis techniques that reveal causes and effects of economic and educational gaps based on racial discrimination and other inequities
4.
Esther Duflo for advances in applied economics through innovative field studies that examine how public policy affects microeconomic outcomes in developing nations
VS.
Jonathan Gruber for his work in crafting public health policy
Physics
Vote here for your predictions for the Nobel Prize in Physics.
The Elite 8 physics match-ups are:
1.
Vera Rubin and Kent Ford for dark matter
VS.
Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking for their contribution to our understanding of the universe
2.
Michio Jimbo and Tetsuji Miwa for developments in integrable systems and their correlation functions in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory, making use of quantum groups, algebraic analysis, and deformation theory
VS.
William Borucki for leadership of NASA's Kepler mission, which uncovered planets and solar systems
3.
Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ronald Drever for the direct detection of gravitational waves
VS.
Harald Rose, Knut Urban, and Maximilian Haider for their development of abberration-corrected electron microscopy, allowing the observation of individual atoms with picometer precision
4.
Sandra M. Faber for leadership in numerous path-breaking studies of extra-galactic astronomy and galaxy formation
VS.
Deborah Jin for her pioneering investigations of the quantum properties of an ultracold gas of fermionic atoms, and for the creation of the first quantized gas of fermionic atoms
Physiology or Medicine
Vote here for your predictions for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The Elite 8 physiology or medicine match-ups are:
1.
Seiji Ogawa for the discovery of the principle for functional magnetic resonance imaging
VS.
Jaques Francis Albert Pierre Miller for his work on the immunological function of the thymus and of T cells, which has revolutionized the science of immunology
2.
Peter Wells for pioneering the development of ultrasonics as a diagnostic and surgical tool
VS.
Theodore Friedmann and Alain Fischer for the proposal of gene therapy and its clinical applications
3.
Matthias Gromeier and Gordana Vlahovic for using a genetically engineered polio virus (PVS-RIPO) to attack glioblastoma, a brain cancer, and discovering that it seeks out and attaches to receptors that are highly common across tumor types, while leaving normal cells alone
VS.
Graeme Clark, Ingebord Hochmair, and Blake Wilson for developing the modern cochlear implant
4.
Maurice Samuel Devaraj for the discovery of a method of suppressing mutations in pathogens such as tuberculosis
VS.
Paul Quinton for significant contributions to the understanding of the mechanisms behind cystic fibrosis, particularly the discovery that the fundamental defect in cystic fibrosis is chloride impermeability
Heather Thorstensen is the manager of communications for Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society.