| Last month’s digital congress was a first for the Association. The organising committee did an extraordinary job putting together fourteen concurrent symposia and two excellent plenary sessions. After congresses I usually comment on unofficial prizes, such as the best dancer at the Gala dinner, or exceptional effort at karaoke (which, of course, does not necessarily mean greatest singer!). Unfortunately, these were not possible to determine by a digital format. Fortunately, there were notable instances of connection with the audience and our greater community that deserve special mention. Read on for the winners of these unofficial awards.
If you’re reading this far, it means that you are interested to see the results of the unofficial IATDMCT awards, so I won’t tease you any further. The prizes below reflect those presentations I saw and the efforts that picked up my attention. Apologies if there were great examples that I’ve missed from the other sessions. If you spotted other excellent examples, please get in touch and we can look at doing a Part 2 article if there are sufficient candidates. You can reach me here on Twitter.
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Award for best use of a GIF in a presentation goes to Jan Willem Alfennaar in his presentation ‘Writing a successful competitive grant proposal’ in the Young Scientist Committee Symposium. Take a look at the full minute at minute 30 in the video. I just wanted to congratulate the YSC for yet another excellent and varied symposium, demonstrating high scientific quality and value for both Young Scientist and Senior Scientist members.
Award for best representation of ‘What could have been if we had the congress in Banff’ goes to Teun van Gelder in his talk about ‘Augmented Renal Clearance and TDM’ in Symposium 11 (see min 3 in the video).
Award for excellent idea for engaging students in a meaningful way goes to plenary speaker, Laura Vandenberg. Laura spoke to us about Glyphosate as a case study for understanding modern safety evaluations in a global context. As the title reflects, Laura is a person that looks at a complex problem in an integral way. Laura ended her talk discussing manufactured doubt, highlighting its importance in Environmental Sciences, and referred to several popular non-fiction books on the topic. She also mentioned that she has started an optional book club with her graduate students, in lieu of the typical journal club, where they read David Michael’s book, the Triumph of Doubt. I loved this idea as I know these types of books really enhance our knowledge about where we are situated historically and globally in our respective fields, and I think this would be an excellent exercise, particularly at a graduate level. See from about minute 41.
Award for most creative transfer of a live activity to a virtual activity goes to Penny Colbourne for the digital handover of the congress flag in the closing ceremony. We saw the IATDMCT travel on a digital map from Banff, Canada, to Rome, Italy. I’m sure Penny didn’t realise that we were all in stitches at our respective ends, happily laughing at our computer screens.
Award for outstanding effort for a whole panel: Fast and Furious! Pithy Patient Practice Points panel*. In the sixty-minute session, the 9 presenters had just five minutes to present an instructive case highlighting the important clinical role of antimicrobial TDM. They also managed to cover the entire globe with cases from almost every continent. It was so fast I didn’t even manage to take a screenshot to share the joy on Twitter.
(*these were: Alan Abdulla, Jan-Willem Alffenaar, Sumith Mathew, Dario Cattaneo, Debbie Marriott, Abdullah Alsultan, Roger Brüggemann, Carsten Müller, Michael Neely, Sophie Stocker)
Lifetime achievement award for use of Twitter goes to Christophe Stove. I am not aware of any of our members who demonstrate a more precise use of Twitter year-round to promote news from the fields that we cover, and news from his lab, than Christophe. Around congress time, Christophe does an exceptional job: his Tweets are engaging and on-point. Follow Christophe here.
Hopefully, we can congratulate our unofficial awardees in person at our next congress in Rome. Remember, if you’d like to make further nominations, you can reach me on Twitter.
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