Categories
Ice on land and sea: glaciers and ice sheets, how they flow, and how much of them is left.
The machinery of rule: constitutions, legislatures, courts, bureaucracies and federal arrangements, and what difference their design makes.
The study of graphs: vertices joined by edges, and everything that can be said about connection, colouring and flow.
Observing the universe through ripples in spacetime rather than light. Merging black holes and neutron stars are its first sources, and the detectors are kilometre-scale interferometers.
The study of groups, the algebraic structures that capture symmetry.
The decomposition of functions into waves: Fourier series and transforms and their generalizations.
The economics of health and care: what treatment costs against what it buys, how insurance and provision are organised, and how they fail.
Information systems in care and public health: clinical records, decision support, and the analysis of what they hold.
The psychological side of physical health: how behaviour, stress and belief bear on illness, treatment and recovery.
Blood and the tissues that make it: anemia, clotting disorders, and the leukemias and lymphomas.
The study of reptiles and amphibians.
The university as an object of study: how it is governed and funded, who gets in, and what a degree does for the person holding it.
Running scientific and engineering computations at scale: parallel architectures, message passing, and the algorithms that keep them busy.
The microscopic study of tissues: how cells are organized into the functional layers that make up an organ.
Language change over time: sound laws, the reconstruction of unattested ancestors, and how languages are related by descent.
The history of Western art music: composers and repertories, notation and sources, and performance practice reconstructed from them.
History turned on itself: how historical writing has been done, what counts as evidence, and why accounts of the same past keep changing.
The study of the human past through evidence such as documents, artifacts, and oral record.
The development of economic ideas: what Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes and their successors actually argued, and how each generation reread the last.
Where schools and universities came from: mass schooling and the state that wanted it, and the older institutions it replaced.