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The members of the 2026 Nicholas C. Mullins Prize Committee have been privileged with the opportunity to evaluate scholarship from promising young academics in the field of STS. However, it is our sad duty to announce that the committee has decided not to award the Mullins Prize in 2026. This decision was unanimous.
In the recent past, the number of nominations for the Mullins Prize has been low, and this year, the committee received only three eligible submissions. These submissions were carefully reviewed from many different perspectives. We found all of them to be worthy of strong consideration, and when compared with each other, the decision to select one over the others was very difficult indeed.
The discussion to identify one that represented exemplary graduate student scholarship was harder still, and this difficulty was significantly a function of the extremely small pool from which we were tasked to select a winner.
The committee wishes to emphasize that the submissions we did receive were of a high quality, but we were in the end unsuccessful in overcoming our own hesitations about selecting a winner in this context.
The committee would like to use this opportunity to ask all our members to nominate the work of promising young scholars around them.
We call on the student members of 4S to put their work forward for the Mullins Prize next year. Unpublished and published manuscripts are eligible.
We want to see more of your work and for you to show us what STS could be.