MRS President's Medal - finalists revealed
06 November 2026

The prestigious MRS President's Medal is awarded annually to organisations or individuals that have made an extraordinary contribution to research but do not have the institutional framework to be recognised by the standard MRS Awards programme.

This year’s finalists are:

Ben Firth, Centre for Young Lives & Centre for Young Lives Research Team for ‘How Online Masculinity Content & Looksmaxxing is Pushing Some Boys & Young Men to Extremes’.

The Centre for Young Lives produced the first national study of 'looksmaxxing', combining focus groups of teenage boys with covert research conducted through a fourteen-year-old alias across social platforms. It documents an online economy that monetises boys' insecurity while seeding misogyny and body-image harm. The method is as notable as the findings: a rare view, from the inside, of an emerging harm that conventional survey approaches struggle to capture.

Read the full report here (PDF). 

Professor Clare McGlynn, Durham University (Durham Law School), Professor Fiona Vera-Gray & Jo Lovett, London Metropolitan University, & Dr Vicky Butterby, Durham University for ‘Freedom Under Threat: Sexual Exposure & Cyberflashing’.

Freedom Under Threat presents the largest UK survey to date of women's experiences of sexual exposure and cyberflashing, drawing on more than four thousand responses. It sits within a sustained body of work that has moved image-based abuse from generic cybercrime to a recognised category of sexual violence, and that has fed directly into new criminal law on cyberflashing and the creation of sexual deepfakes.

Read the full report here (PDF).

Professor Simon Dymond, Professor Matthew Jones & Pippa Boering, Swansea University, Kishan Patel, Gambling Harm UK & Daniel Leightley, Kings College London for ‘Gambling, suicide and mental health: treatment utilisation in Wales: case-control, whole-population-based study’.

Researchers at Swansea University produced the first UK study to use three decades of routinely collected NHS records, via the SAIL Databank, to identify factors predicting suicide among people with a gambling diagnosis - finding it a stronger predictor than several established mental-health conditions. The work demonstrates that linked healthcare records can flag risk in time for intervention: an analytical and preventive contribution of clear public value.

Read the full report here (PDF).  

Tinuke Awe & Clotilde Abe, Five X More & Dr Michelle Peter & Reyss Wheeler for ‘The Five X More Black Maternity Experiences Report: Continuing the Conversation on Black Maternal Care in the UK’.

Five X More, a grassroots organisation founded by Tinuke Awe and Clotilde Abe, surveyed over eleven hundred Black and Black mixed-heritage women on their maternity care between 2021 and 2025. Against a documented threefold disparity in maternal mortality, it found discrimination and dismissed concerns persisting despite rising awareness. Community-owned throughout, the work has informed a parliamentary inquiry into Black maternal health - evidence generated by, not merely about, the population it concerns.

Read the full report here (PDF).

The winner will be revealed at the MRS Awards in London on 7 December