Anna Melnyk receives the 2026 TU Delft Open Science Research Award

Anna Melnyk has been named the 2026 TU Delft Open Science Research Award laureate for the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM). Her work in climate ethics and ethics and philosophy of technology connects Open Science with transdisciplinary co-creation and questions of justice in knowledge production.

Melnyk’s research examines how values, responsibilities and understandings of justice shape climate action, energy transitions and technological development. It brings philosophical inquiry into dialogue with modelling, engineering and the social sciences, while creating spaces for co-creation with artists, practitioners, NGOs and Indigenous knowledge holders.

Openness beyond access

In this approach, openness extends beyond making research outputs publicly accessible. It concerns how research questions are framed, whose knowledge is recognised, and who can meaningfully shape the methods and futures being explored. Transdisciplinarity is therefore not simply an exchange between academic disciplines: it involves developing questions, approaches and resources together with people whose knowledge and experiences may otherwise remain outside academic research.

These practices have grown through communities including the TU Delft Decolonial Working Group and the Designing for Justice SIG at Delft Design for Values. Such spaces support collective learning and reflection on the assumptions underlying research and design. One tangible expression is Global Reflections, the VSD Envisioning Cards extension set co-created with Angela María Díaz and SolipsisArt, which brings a wider range of perspectives into reflection on technology and values.

For Melnyk, Open Science brings methodological and ethical responsibilities together: making methods transparent and reusable, while attending to participation, recognition and the conditions under which knowledge is shared.

“In climate ethics and the philosophy of technology, questions of whose knowledge is recognised matter profoundly for the futures that are imagined and shaped. For me, co-creation means allowing research itself to be transformed through encounters with different forms of knowledge, experience and ways of understanding the world, not simply inviting others into an agenda that has already been defined. I therefore see this award as a shared recognition of the people, communities, and more than human worlds through whom this work has taken shape.”

Anna Melnyk

Photo credits: Laure Herpain