DPhil student Ayush Noori has been awarded the first prize in the 2026 G-Research Oxford PhD Prize, recognising the outstanding quality and impact of his doctoral research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, neuroscience and medicine.
The annual G-Research PhD Prize celebrates exceptional research by final and penultimate year doctoral students across the University of Oxford. The prize, worth up to £10,000, recognises excellence in disciplines including machine learning, quantitative finance, mathematics, computer science, statistics, physics, and engineering.
Ayush’s research focuses on developing AI technologies to improve the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of neurological disorders and other complex diseases. His work brings together machine learning, neuroscience and clinical research to accelerate scientific discovery.
He recently introduced PROTON, a relational foundation model designed to generate new insights into neurological disease biology. The model integrates millions of biomedical relationships and brain cell data to generate and test hypotheses across multiple scales of disease, helping researchers identify potential disease mechanisms, therapeutic targets and drug candidates.
Commenting on the award, Ayush said:
“I am grateful to G-Research and the University of Oxford for selecting my work for the G-Research 2026 PhD Prize, and to my mentors, collaborators, and colleagues whose guidance and support have made this work possible. I am hopeful that, together, we can work towards a future free of neurological disease.”
Professor David Clifton, Royal Academy of Engineering Chair of Clinical Machine Learning and Ayush’s supervisor, said:
“Seeing great research, by great researchers, recognised in this way is one of the great privileges of my job. Very many congratulations to Ayush on winning the G-Research Prize, which is a fitting outcome for his work on the PROTON project.”
The G-Research judging panel praised both the scientific ambition and translational impact of the work:
“Ayush Noori was a worthy winner of the first prize for the exceptional ambition, scientific rigour, and real-world impact of his PROTON project. Rather than stopping at computational benchmarks, Ayush led one of the rare examples of true AI-driven scientific discovery. What distinguished Ayush’s work was not only technical excellence, but his ability to bridge AI, neuroscience and medicine to create a discovery engine. PROTON represents a compelling vision for the future of AI in science: foundation models that generate testable hypotheses and accelerate biomedical breakthroughs.”
G-Research also highlighted Ayush’s “outstanding publication record, leadership of large interdisciplinary collaborations and validation of AI predictions in real biological systems,” noting that he emerged as the strongest candidate in a record-breaking year for applications.
Everyone at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering congratulates Ayush on this outstanding achievement.