Princeton University’s Janet Currie is winner of the NOMIS Foundation’s Distinguished Scientist and Scholar Award, which comes with a research grant of $2-million to support exceptional scientists exploring new and unconventional directions in science.

Currie’s research focuses on health and wellbeing, especially of children. Her project supported by NOMIS will harness big data to better understand children’s mental health.

NOMIS is a private, Swiss foundation that supports scientific endeavors across all disciplines. The foundation favors researchers who participate in interdisciplinary collaborations, apply a broad range of innovative methods and disseminate their work widely. In particular, NOMIS funds research projects led by pioneers who use radically different approaches, apply new expertise or engage novel disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.

“I am extremely honored and grateful for this recognition and support from the NOMIS Foundation,” said Currie, the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. “This award recognizes the tremendous importance of child mental health and the social imperative to find a way to use the big data generated by the health care system to improve the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of children with these conditions.”

Currie’s current work focuses on socioeconomic differences in health and access to health care, environmental threats to health and mental health. She co-directs Princeton’s Center for Health and Wellbeing and the Program on Children at the National Bureau of Economic Research.