Rastogi receives Heineken Young Scientists Award

The 2026 Heineken Young Scientists Award for Natural Sciences has been awarded to Dr. Ayushi Rastogi. Rastogi receives the prize for her research on ways to develop reliable and future-proof software, thereby making the digital sector more accessible to a broader group of people. She focuses on the human side of software development by investigating how developers collaborate and deploy AI.

The award amounts to 15,000 euros and a platform to make her work visible to a wider audience. The award ceremony will take place on Thursday, 1 October, at ARTIS Amsterdam. Rastogi recently won the Langerhuizen Bate Prize for her research.

Human side of software systems

Rastogi works with real-life software systems, not in a lab. In doing so, she offers a unique glimpse behind the scenes at software companies. She focuses on the human side of software development by investigating how developers collaborate and deploy AI. Now that AI is taking over more and more software development tasks, the role of the developer is also shifting. Rastogi analyzes large amounts of data and speaks with software developers via surveys and interviews. In the coming years, she intends to further investigate how humans and AI can effectively collaborate in building the next generation of software systems.

Software more accessible to a wider audience

Rastogi is investigating how software can be developed to be reliable, future-proof, and accessible to a wider audience, especially now that AI is claiming an increasingly larger role. She emphasizes the importance of diversity within software development teams. Diverse representation in teams contributes to software that better aligns with the experiences and characteristics of different user groups. A well-known example is facial recognition, which works less effectively on darker skin tones.

Heineken Young Scientists Awards

The Heineken Young Scientists Awards have been presented since 2018 within the domains of Medical/Biomedical Sciences, Humanities, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. The awards recognize young researchers who make a significant contribution to science early in their careers. The awards are made possible by the Alfred Heineken Funds Foundation.

Read more 

• Rastogi wint Langerhuizen-Bate prijs 

• Heineken prijzen

• Onderzoek dr. Ayushi Rastogi