Infection Science Award

The Infection Science Award is an exchange scheme that facilitates the most promising trainee and early career presenters from the Federation of Infection Societies (FIS) Annual Conference (Infectious Disease Futures session) to present at the Microbiology Society Annual Conference (Infection Forum) and vice versa.

Eligibility

All self-defining early career and trainee presenters are eligible for the scheme. As a guide, the Microbiology Society’s EC Forum considers you an early career microbiologist if you’re an undergraduate or postgraduate student, or within five years of appointment to your first position after your highest degree earned. However, if this doesn’t fit your situation and you consider yourself an early career researcher, you are welcome to participate.

How to enter

If you are eligible for and wish to be considered for the Infection Science Award via a talk in the Microbiology Society Infectious Disease Futures session, please provide a statement (max. 150 words) outlining your current position and how the award will benefit your professional development. The judging panel will review this statement alongside your abstract to shortlist the entrants that will be considered for the Award during the session.

The awardees will be offered registration for the reciprocal meeting and invited to submit a publication to Journal of Medical Microbiology (JMM).

Award criteria

Abstract shortlisting

The abstracts submitted by eligible entrants will be shortlisted against the following criteria:

For the FIS Infectious Disease Futures session

• Essential:
  
  1. coherent and well written abstract
  2. rationale, data collected, interpretation and conclusions clearly stated
  3. clear relevance of clinical/medical topic to infectious disease
   
• Desirable:
  
  4. topic of potential interest to basic scientist
  5. clinical/medical topic lacking in basic scientific infection research
  6. topic that would potentially benefit from interaction with basic infection scientists and Microbiology Society Annual Conference attendees

For the Microbiology Society Infection Forum

• Essential:
  
  1. coherent and well written abstract
  2. rationale, data collected, interpretation and conclusions clearly stated
  3. clear relevance of topic to the microbiology of infection
   
• Desirable:
  
  4. topic of potential interest to clinicians and medical/biomedical related FIS attendees
  5. basic scientific infection research topic lacking in translation to clinical/medical/biomedical and related practice
  6. topic that would potentially benefit from interaction with clinicians and medical/biomedical related FIS attendees

Session presentations

A judging panel will attend the session to judge the entrants and select the awardees for announcement in the weeks following FIS or the Microbiology Society Annual Conference. The judges will focus on scientific content and communication and criteria related to the translation potential of research outlined in presentations. The full judging criteria can be found below:

Microbiology Society Infection Science Award Judging Form

FIS 2023 Winners

• Neil Cunningham, NHS
• Eva Bernadette Benyei, University of Cambridge
• Ijeoma Okoliegbe, NHS Grampian, Aberdeen
• James Shepherd, University of Glasgow- MRC Centre for Virus Research

Previous Winners