What makes a crisis feel “normal”? How can identical twins have completely different health journeys? For innovative work that addresses these questions through cross-field collaboration, Rachit Dubey and Jiacheng Miao are the grand prize winners of the 2025/26 NOMIS & Science Young Explorer Award.
by Mahathi Ramaswamy
“Dubey uses state-of-the-art tools from cognitive science to tell a compelling story of why humanity is not responding more urgently to the climate change crisis,” said Stella Hurtley, deputy editor at Science. “Miao repurposes quantitative methods from economics and applies them to genetics to increase equity in genetic risk analysis.”
“It is fantastic to see these young, curious minds addressing such relevant and exciting questions,” said Markus Reinhard, NOMIS Foundation managing director.
The human mind versus reality
When Dubey began his career as a computational cognitive scientist, he was struck by the ease with which humans adapt to new information or experiences. In his prize-winning essay in Science, he points out how this ability can be a double-edged sword.
“My work asks a fundamental question: When does adaptability, a core strength of human cognition, become a liability?” said Dubey, now an assistant professor at the department of communication at the University of California Los Angeles.
While adaptation can make people flexible, it can also dull perception. Over time, treasured objects can lose emotional value and even pressing concerns start to feel less urgent.
Dubey and his colleagues combined computational tools and large-scale behavioral experiments to analyze the “boiling frog” effect — the idea that gradual change fails to garner attention until the situation becomes critical.
The researchers presented people with either binary or continuous climate change data; the former represented temperature changes as “yes or no” data (e.g., did the local lake freeze this year?), while the latter offered continuous information (e.g., the historical record of winter temperatures).
Although both datasets shared the same underlying trends, people perceived climate change as more impactful when presented with binary data, partly due to an illusion of sudden change.
In another study, Dubey and his team also examined adaptation to improving circumstances. This analysis revealed that, while material benefits bring temporary satisfaction, humans are programmed to “always want more”— even if it causes unhappiness.
“In both cases, the root problem is the same,” Dubey explained. “We normalize things in our lives because things are not changing fast enough in our perception for us to respond appropriately. It just becomes the new normal.”
According to Dubey, this mismatch between real-world events and perceived change may underlie societal apathy and inaction towards critical issues such as climate change.
Decoding nature versus nurture
Miao, too, is interested in mismatches. Growing up, he was fascinated by the contrasting health outcomes of his twin uncles. Although genetically identical, one suffered from severe health issues in his forties, while the other remained healthy until much later in life. What differentiated the two were environment, lifestyles and access to healthcare.
“I came to realize that understanding health requires bridging biology with social context,” writes Miao, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, in his prize-winning essay. “DNA never functions in a vacuum; they are shaped by lived experiences, environmental exposures, and systemic inequality.”
Motivated by how economists study inequality across distributions (rather than through averages), Miao developed a series of computational tools to reveal how genetic variations influenced human traits under different environmental conditions.
Starting with QUAIL, which could analyze a single variant at a time, he and his colleagues eventually built a framework that could analyze sex differences in genetic effects across more than 500 traits. Furthermore, these tools could predict real-world outcomes such as the impact of inhaler treatments on smokers with different genetic backgrounds.
With the advent of artificial intelligence, Miao soon encountered a new concern: An increasing reliance on unreliable AI-generated data in scientific research.
To address this problem, he created rigorous safeguards to adjust for inflated results during AI-assisted analysis. His method POP-GWAS could utilize AI to identify DNA elements associated with osteoporosis, highlighting potential targets for future therapeutics. Another tool, X-Wing, makes genetic risk prediction methods more equitable by including data from underrepresented populations.
Miao believes that, with the right guard rails, AI-powered research can accelerate drug discovery and help tailor precision medicine strategies for individuals.
“AI can supercharge science, but we must steer it carefully,” Miao cautioned.
Bridging silos in academia
“Both prize winners are inspiring examples of young researchers that are using creative approaches to answer fundamental questions at the intersection of life and social sciences,” said Hurtley.
Dubey’s strategy of viewing climate change via the lens of cognitive science was met with skepticism at first, he says. Today, he is in conversations with climate communicators and policy makers who are interested in applying his findings to create more engaging public-facing tools. Dubey hopes that he can continue to build bridges between scientific disciplines in a way that finds relevance in public policy.
For Miao, AI presents a promising avenue to make science more accessible. One of his goals is to develop an interactive AI agent that can help researchers understand and replicate scientific studies outside their own fields of expertise. He is also interested in creating models that can process datasets in languages other than English.
“Science, at its best, should not just explain the world, but help more people thrive in it,” he said.
Go to this AAAS release: Prize winners harness interdisciplinary tools to investigate climate apathy and human health
Feature photos: Left: Rachit Dubey (Photo by Love + Wolves Co) / Right: Jiacheng Miao portrait courtesy of Jiacheng Miao
