September 28, 2026
This year’s Golden Goose Award honorees turned coffee stains, holiday lights, and a noisy ultrasound experiment into breakthroughs in physics, disaster response, and cancer treatment.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced this year’s Golden Goose honorees, including Sidney R. Nagel, Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physics, the James Franck Institute, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College.
The Golden Goose Award, which recognizes unexpected, seemingly odd federally funded research that ultimately leads to transformative breakthroughs for science and society, announced seven researchers who demonstrate how federally funded research can turn everyday observations and unexpected results into practical advances in cancer treatment, disaster response, and everyday physics.
Everyday Phenomena and Finding Beauty in Nature’s Disordered Systems
Sidney Nagel has spent his career uncovering the hidden physics behind commonplace, yet unexpectedly subtle, phenomena and finding beauty in nature’s bounteous disorder. Why does spilled coffee leave behind a stain only around its perimeter? How does sand flow, jam, or shift under pressure? What determines the shape and motion of a splashing water droplet? Such events are all around us, yet they often escape serious inquiry.
Nagel has been compelled by these questions. Recognizing that seemingly ordinary experiences can conceal profound scientific mysteries, he has pursued questions that many researchers initially dismissed as too ordinary or inconsequential to matter. Nagel’s curiosity-driven investigations, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy, have revealed fundamental principles that govern materials whose parts are arranged in seemingly random ways.
In turn, these seemingly mundane observations have been applied to a wide range of real-world applications, including improved inkjet printing technologies, safer and more efficient grain silo designs, enhanced industrial mixing and power-handling processes, improved diagnostic techniques that analyze dried blood and saliva droplets, and many more.
Read on to learn more about Nagel’s work.
About the Golden Goose Award
The Golden Goose Award highlights unexpected impacts where research sometimes seems odd, obscure, or has some uncertainty or serendipity that leads to a breakthrough.
Former Congressman Jim Cooper conceived the idea to elevate investing in curiosity-driven research in a wide range of fields without knowing where it would lead, yielding societal benefits.
Since 2012, groups of researchers have been recognized each year for breakthroughs in the development of life-saving medicines and treatments, game-changing social and behavioral insights, and major technological advances related to national security, energy, the environment, communications, and public health.
The Golden Goose Award has strong bipartisan support, and researchers are honored every year at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., where members of Congress who are part of the award’s bipartisan, bicameral congressional “Gaggle” speak to the importance of the award and of federal funding of scientific research.