UD Honors Excellence in Open Data with Inaugural Impact Awards
photo by Evan Krape
The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, in partnership with the Data Science Institute and Delaware EPSCoR, is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural Open Data Impact Awards.
The Open Data Impact Awards celebrate UD students, faculty and staff whose openly shared datasets continue to make meaningful contributions to research, teaching and public engagement.
“An open dataset is more than uploading a spreadsheet into a repository—it requires careful attention to the curation of records and related documentation to render the data truly reusable,” said Annie Johnson, associate university librarian for research, teaching and technology. “The awards committee was impressed by the quality of the applications we received, rendering the decisions very difficult to make. We commend all of the applicants for their strong commitment to increasing public access to scholarly data.”
2025 Open Data Impact Award Winners
- Daria Blinova, doctoral student in the College of Arts and Sciences: “Individual Attendance Data for UNFCCC COPs and pre-COPs”
- Kyle Frankel Davis, associate professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences and Endalkachew Abebe Kebede, doctoral student in the College of Earth, Ocean and Environment: “A global open-source dataset of monthly irrigated and rainfed cropped areas (MIRCA-OS) for the 21st century”
- Alon Hafri, assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science: “The psychophysics of compositionality: Relational scene perception occurs in a canonical order”
Honorable Mentions
- Kevin Brinson, assistant research professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences: “The Delaware Environmental Observing System”
- Jing Gao, associate professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences: “Global 1/8-Degree Urban Land Fraction Grids, SSP-Consistent Projections and Base Year, v1 (2000 – 2100)”
- Pinki Mondal, associate professor in the Department of of Geography and Spatial Sciences: “High-resolution remotely sensed datasets for saltwater intrusion across the Delmarva Peninsula”
Award winners presented lightning talks about their datasets during the Delaware Data Science Symposium on Friday, October 24. Each recipient will also receive a $1,000 prize in recognition of their contributions to advancing open data at the University of Delaware. The call for applications for the 2026 Open Data Impact Awards will be announced in fall 2026.