Prize Lectures
Nominations for the 2027 Prize Lectures and 2028 Prize Medal will open on Tuesday April 7 2026. The deadline for nominations is 14 June 2026.
Each year, the Microbiology Society awards six Prize Lectures in recognition of significant contributions to microbiology. All members are invited to nominate an outstanding microbiologist for a Microbiology Society Prize.
The Prize Lectures
How to submit a nomination
To nominate someone for a Prize Lecture, please visit the relevant Prize Lecture page above to find out more about its award criteria, what to include in a nomination and past winners of the Prize.
After you’ve read the award criteria to determine what to include, you and your fellow nominator (if relevant) should contact the person you’d like to nominate so that you can work with them. Nominators should be members of the Society, but the candidate does not have to be one. We have provided example nominations to demonstrate the level of detail required. Please note that all of the example nomination forms provided belong to previously successful Prize winners, which follow an older format.
To submit a nomination, you will be asked to sign into your MiSociety account and complete the form within the system. The form will allow you to name co-nominators or collaborators but only one member should submit the final form.
You will need to enter some text into all mandatory fields before being able to save a draft of your nomination. Once saved, you will be able to return to edit it, however once a nomination is submitted it cannot be amended. You may therefore prefer to collaborate via an offline version and copy it across when ready for submission for ease.
You can contact the Microbiology Society Prizes team for support via email at [email protected].
The Microbiology Society is committed to ensuring equal access to opportunities to participate in our activities, and therefore we are asking members who nominate to our Prize Lectures to ensure their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Questionnaire answers are up to date. While it is voluntary to disclose information about yourself, your responses will be instrumental in supporting us to make the Society more inclusive. All of your responses to this questionnaire will be treated as confidential, in line with our privacy policy and data protection laws. Any reporting of the data will be anonymised and will be used to monitor and review the diversity and inclusivity of the Society and its activities.
The Prize Award Panel
Each year, we ask for applications from the membership to participate in the Prize Award Panel. An appropriately sized panel is convened and chaired by the Society’s General Secretary from these applications, aiming to include members working across all of the broad specialisms of eukaryotic and prokaryotic microbiology and virology, as well as a spectrum of career stages, geographical location and a variety of inclusion perspectives.
Following the nomination deadline, Panel Members are sent the nominees names and affiliations and required to declare any conflicts of interest prior to receiving the full nomination information. Should a substantial conflict of interest arise, panel members may step down or withdraw from the review of that specific prize.
Prize Award Panel members then view an Unconscious Bias resources ahead of reviewing and ranking all prize lecture nominations in isolation against the advertised guidance and Prize Lecture rules. The individual rankings are then returned to the office, collated, and recirculated with a mean average “score” for each nomination ahead of a Panel meeting to discuss the results. The scores are used as a tool to instigate a thorough discussion to reach a consensus of an agreed shortlist for the Prize Medal, and a recommendation for all other prize winners for the Advisory Council and then Trustee Board to consider and accept.
Successful nominees are contacted with a letter from the Chief Executive, usually in October. Successful nominators are notified when the nominee has accepted the award and the obligation to give a lecture at the relevant Annual Conference.
Unsuccessful nominators are contacted and advised that their nomination will be considered again according to the rules advertised on the relevant Prize Lecture page. They will also be advised if their nomination was received for the wrong prize and encouraged to resubmit appropriately. It is up to the nominator to notify the nominee.
Prize Lecture rules
The rules for all Prize Lectures are the same and are listed below. If you have any questions regarding the Prize nomination process, please contact [email protected].
- Prizes are awarded on the conditions that the work comprising the subject matter of the nomination has been conducted in good faith and to the highest professional and ethical standards and that all information and documentation in support of the same, and in support of any nomination in connection with the same, are true, factual and not misleading. The Society reserves the right to withdraw any prize awarded if the Society considers any of the aforementioned conditions not to have been satisfied or if the Society, in its absolute discretion, considers that withdrawing any prize awarded would be in the best interests of the Society and/or the integrity of the prize in question.
- All Prizes are awarded annually.
- Nominations should be made by any member of the Society, regardless of membership period or category. The nominee need not be a member of the Society.
- Nominations may require accompanying documentation; please see individual Prize pages for requirements. Nominations will only be considered if all documentation is received before the advertised deadline.
- Recipients of Prizes may not be nominated for the same Prize Lecture on a subsequent occasion; however, unsuccessful nominees can be considered for a further two years upon confirmation from the nominators. Nominators will be contacted by the office to update paperwork if required. If the period expires and the nomination remains unsuccessful, individuals may be nominated again after a one-year period. This is in place to protect the nominee, as they may wish to withdraw from the process. This does not apply to the Fleming Prize, as nominations will be reconsidered for the entire duration of the candidate’s eligibility, pending confirmation of the nominators; after this period they would be ineligible.
- Prize winners will be expected to present a lecture based on their work at the following Microbiology Society Annual Conference. The expenses of the Prize Lecturer will be paid by the Society. Prize winners should contact the Society at their earliest convenience should circumstances change, resulting in conference attendance no longer being possible.
- At the discretion of the Editors of the Society’s journals, Prize recipients may be encouraged to publish the lecture in a suitable journal.
- The decision of the Prizes Award Panel is final.