Jan Korbel and Elma Dervic have been awarded the City of Vienna’s “Förderungspreise” 2026 for their outstanding scientific work.
What makes societies polarize? And what can millions of medical records reveal about inequality in healthcare? These questions may seem worlds apart. But both lead to the same kind of challenge: understanding how patterns emerge from the interactions of countless individual elements.
This is the territory explored by Jan Korbel and Elma Dervic, each from a very different scientific perspective. And it is this work that has now been recognized by the City of Vienna.
The “Förderungspreise” honor outstanding achievements by emerging researchers and practitioners in Vienna. The awards are presented annually across a range of fields, including science, art, culture and adult education.
FINDING PATTERNS IN MILLIONS OF HEALTH RECORDS
Elma Dervic works at the intersection of medicine, data science and complexity research. Her research uses large-scale health datasets to investigate how diseases develop, how different conditions are connected and where inequalities in healthcare arise.
Medical records contain millions of individual data points. Taken together, they can reveal patterns that are difficult to detect at the level of individual patients. Dervic uses data-driven methods to study disease trajectories, identify factors associated with health risks and investigate differences in health and healthcare use across population groups.
UNDERSTANDING HOW SOCIETIES DIVIDE
Jan Korbel studies how collective behavior emerges from the interactions of individuals. Drawing on methods from statistical physics and information theory, he investigates polarization, information processing and other forms of social dynamics.
A central question in his work is how divisions within society emerge and persist. Rather than looking at polarization simply as a difference in opinions, Korbel examines the underlying interactions and structures that can cause social divisions to grow. His research applies concepts from physics and complexity science to phenomena that unfold across entire societies.
More information about the City of Vienna’s 2026 “Förderungspreise” is available from the City of Vienna here.
