Two Oxford Engineering DPhil students win G-Research 2026 PhD Prize

Ayush Noori, and Haitz Sáez de Ocáriz Borde (former DPhil student) have been recognised in the prestigious G-Research 2026 PhD Prize. The annual awards celebrate exceptional doctoral research at the University of Oxford, recognising projects with outstanding scientific quality, innovation and potential for real-world impact.

Ayush, who was awarded first prize, conducts interdisciplinary research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, neuroscience and medicine. He is supervised by Prof David Clifton. His work focuses on developing AI technologies to improve the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of neurological disorders and other complex diseases. Among his contributions is PROTON, a relational foundation model designed to generate new insights into neurological disease by analysing millions of biomedical relationships and brain cells. According to G-Research, PROTON's predictions have been validated through laboratory experiments, patient-derived brain organoids and clinical data from more than 610,000 patients, demonstrating its potential to accelerate biomedical discovery.

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.'

Haitz Sáez de Ocáriz Borde was recognised for his research into the mathematical foundations of artificial intelligence. Supervised by Professor Xiaowen Dong and Professor Michael Bronstein, his work explores the geometry and structure of the internal representations learned by AI systems. By studying the connections between graphs, manifolds and latent spaces, his research aims to help machine-learning models represent complex real-world data more faithfully, efficiently and reliably, laying the foundations for more robust AI systems capable of tackling challenging scientific and engineering problems.

Ocáriz said:

‘Receiving the G-Research PhD Prize is a great honour, and I am deeply grateful and humbled by this recognition. It reflects not only my own work, but also the guidance and support of my supervisors, collaborators and colleagues throughout my DPhil.’

Another Engineering former DPhil student, Álvaro Arroyo, was recognised by the same prize from G-Research last year. Álvaro’s work focused on incorporating sequential and geometric structure into deep neural networks, and was supervised by Professor Xiaowen Dong and Professor Álvaro Cartea.