From our General Secretary: our Prizes Panel and how you can get involved
Posted on November 19, 2025 by Professor Karen Robinson, General Secretary
Every year, the Society's General Secretary oversees our prize awards process, through which the exceptional prize awardees of our six Prize Lectures are identified. You can find more information about all of the prizes and former winners on our Prize Lectures pages.
Below is a short blog post from our current General Secretary, Karen Robinson, about how the process works. We encourage you to nominate a colleague, or volunteer to be on the Prize Award Panel, so that you can help us to ensure that future Prize Lectures continue to be inspirational.
The Prize Lectures are a hugely popular and established feature of the Microbiology Society Annual Conference and have been an opportunity for us to really celebrate the astonishing talent in our community for years. It is, therefore, vital that we ensure that the way we go about selecting our winners reflects our core values of being transparent and professional in everything we do; and, our reputation as a friendly, nurturing and approachable community, driven by the experience of a diverse set of members.
The Prize Award Panel, which reviews all the Prize Lecture nominations and makes recommendations for the winners, is comprised of a cross section of our members, aiming to represent the diversity of our membership. A new Prizes Panel is formed every year. We seek members through an open invitation to the entire membership, encouraging applications through targeted emails from me, as General Secretary, as well as through our newsletters, web stories and by encouraging members of our governance and Champions to share the opportunity within their networks. We are careful to ensure that, where possible, the overall Panel composition has members working across all the broad specialisms of eukaryotic and prokaryotic microbiology and virology. We also look to recruit Panel members from a spectrum of career stages, geographical locations, backgrounds and representatives focusing on equality, diversity and inclusion. Where this balance is not achieved through applications from the membership, we approach members directly to participate.
The process the Panel goes through to form their recommendation is no small undertaking, partly due to the high number of quality nominations that are received every year! You can find the list of 2025 Prize Award Panel members and read more about the specifics of the process they go through to reach their recommendations on the Prize Award Panel section of our Prize Lectures page. These recommendations are submitted to the Advisory Council for approval, before the final award is made by the Board of Trustees.
Winners are ultimately selected for the strength of their science and the evidence provided on the nomination form, showing they meet the criteria for the relevant prize. However, it’s also really important to us that the suite of winners over the years is representative of our whole community. This means we really want to encourage as much participation from a wide breadth of nominations, nominators and Prize Panel members as possible.
So please, when you see that call go out – get involved!