The three recipients of the Golden Goose Award for 2024 have been announced. They include research projects that led to major scientific advancements in artificial intelligence, ecology, and the use of satellite imagery to locate undiscovered penguin populations in the Antarctic.
The Golden Goose Award recognizes federally funded research that initially appears trivial or obscure but ultimately results in major scientific breakthroughs. It celebrates the ultimate value of basic research and its fundamental importance in advancing knowledge. The awards are hosted annually by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
The name of the award derives from the “Golden Fleece Awards,” a tongue-in-cheek designation coined by the late senator William Proxmire in the 1970s to ridicule federal spending he considered wasteful. Proxmire singled out research that sounded odd or unimportant and was easily mis-characterized as a waste of taxpayer funds.
Proxmire’s ridicule was ultimately converted into an honor when Representative Jim Cooper of Tennessee introduced the idea of the Golden Goose Award almost two decades ago. Championing an award that would recognize the benefits of federally funded research by highlighting examples of apparently inconsequential studies that have led to major breakthroughs, Cooper announced the creation of the Golden Goose Award in Spring 2012.
That same year the Golden Goose Awards’ founding organizations issued the first three awards to groups of researchers whose “seemingly obscure, federally-funded research had led to major breakthroughs in biomedical research, medical treatments, and computing and communications technologies.”
Since then, researchers have been recognized annually for basic science investigations that have led to life-saving medicines and treatments; major social and behavioral insights; and technological advances involving national security, energy, the environment, communications, and public health.
The Golden Goose winners for 2024 are:
Jeff Walters, the Harold Bailey Professor of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech University, for a research program that began in the 1980s and ultimately helped remove the rare red-cockaded woodpecker from the endangered species list.
Walters discovered that the loss of the longleaf pine and similar tree species in the U.S. Southeast was harming the birds’ breeding areas. The woodpeckers make their homes in the cavities of the tress that can take years to create. It was learned that drilling artificial cavities into pines would aid the woodpecker’s breeding. In the early 2000s, the Department of Defense helped build artificial cavities in pines across the region. Red-cockaded woodpecker populations have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s.
Christian Che-Castaldo, Heather Joan Lynch, Mathew Schwaller, for their use of satellite imagery to discover 1.5 million previously undocumented Adélie penguins in the Antarctic. In the 1980s, the team was able to find the penguin colonies by using satellites to pinpoint the location of their poop. Later technological advancements enabled the team to analyze decades of historical satellite data, resulting in the discovery of new Adélie penguin colonies in hard-to-reach and dangerous areas of the Antarctic.
Christina Che-Castaldo is a quantitative ecologist affiliated with the U.S. Geological Survey, Wisconsin Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit, and the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Heather J. Lynch is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University. Mathew Schwaller’s affiliation is with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Geoffrey Hinton, James L. McClelland, David E. Rumelhart for their work starting in the late 1970s that led to a new model of human cognition emphasizing a parallel distributed processing framework. They described how cognitive processes can occur within a network of simple, interconnected, neuron-like processing units. A 1986 paper detailed how a learning algorithm based on their research could efficiently train a complex neural network. Later advancements enabled the researchers to revisit their work in the mid-2010s, paving the way for the growth of AI in the last decade.
Geoffrey Hinton is an emeritus professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. James Lloyd “Jay” McClelland is the Lucie Stern Professor at Stanford University, where he was formerly the chair of the Psychology Department. The late David Rumelhart was a psychologist who held academic appointments st the University of California, San Diego and then Stanford University.
The National Science Foundation supported all the Golden Goose winners in 2023 and 2024 and has funded 22 of the 39 recipients since the awards were launched.
“The federal government’s ongoing commitment to fund university-based scientific research has repeatedly proven to be a wise investment in helping the nation achieve its priorities. All three stories further demonstrate the importance of NSF funding for basic scientific discoveries,” said Barbara R. Snyder, president of the Association of American Universities, in an NSF news release.
The Golden Goose awardees are honored every year at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., where members of Congress of both parties speak to the importance of the award and federal funding of scientific research.