Annual Award Winners, 2021
24 June 2021
We are delighted to announce the winners of our annual prizes, which were awarded on Wednesday 23 June at the HDR Scientific Conference.
Team of the Year Award
Team working is core to HDR UK’s mission. This award celebrates collaborative endeavours by groups of researchers, innovators, technologists etc working together within HDR UK and beyond. Members of the health data community, patients, and public were able to nominate a team or propose their own for HDR UK Team of the Year.
Winner:
A team of more than 180 members from 41 organisations across the UK spanning disciplines and career stages, working together innovatively. The consortium has developed principles for participation – anyone who signs up to these can join the consortium.
Read more about the winning team in this case study.
Highly commended:
A supportive team with representatives from across disciplines and career stages- bringing together clinicians and data scientists; including a training component to help integrate junior members.
Read more about the EMAP team in this case study.
A highly functional team that brings together industry and academia, complementary skillsets, and different geographies.
Find out more about this prize and view the selection committee here.
Impact of the Year Award
HDR UK aims to unite the UK’s health data to enable discoveries that improve people’s lives. This award was open to pieces of work that had contributed to this goal, including clinical practice or policy, algorithms, software, publications and more. Members of the health data community, patients, and public were able to nominate an impact or propose their own for HDR UK Impact of the Year.
Winners:
An innovative and hugely collaborative approach which has helped pave the way for citizens and society to escape the COVID-19 pandemic – with demonstrable impact around the world. Demonstrating commitment to transparency, use of a Trusted Research Environment, patient/public involvement in the design and conduct of the study, and use of a proactive media approach to disseminating the results.
Read more about the winning impact in this case study.
Impressively rapid recruitment, broad reach and findings that have helped to save numerous lives around the world. Demonstrated impact of digitally driven data rich trials to transform the speed and scale of clinical research which will have a lasting impact on the way treatment trials are conducted in future.
Read more about the winning impact in this case study.
Highly commended:
A leading example of the innovative use of primary care data and settings whilst working at pace and scale.
Read more about the shortlisted impact in this case study.
Find out more about this prize and view the selection committee here.
Reproducibility recognitions
Reproducibility is central to HDR UK’s values. In an effort to recognise and reward practices which support reproducibility and reuse, applicants were asked to highlight any practices employed by their team that supporting reproducibility and reuse – such as (but not limited to) pre-registration, use of reporting guidelines, FAIR data, open-source software, registered reports, etc.
This year’s Reproducibility Recognition recipients, selected as exemplars of good practice, include:
A code-based analysis that has been designed with re-use in mind. Where the original data are missing due to necessary privacy protection measures, the researchers have made sure to provide full explanation and alternative “synthetic” data sets that allow the tool to still be effectively run without compromising patient data.
An exemplar of a high-quality data source designed with the FAIR principles of data in mind, with impeccable metadata.
Early Career Lightning Talk Award
Selected early career researchers, technologists, and innovators from the HDR UK community presented their work with health data as a 4-minute lightning talk at the HDR UK annual conference. Attendees voted live for the most impactful presentation.
Winner:
- Daniel Thompson, Swansea University
Presentation title: Staff-pupil SARS-CoV-2 infection pathways in schools in Wales: A population-level linked data approach.
Read more about Daniel’s work in this case study.
Four other presentations were shortlisted for the early career talks and presented during a session at the HDR UK annual conference on 16 June. These were:
- Jelena Bešević, University of Oxford – The UK Biobank COVID-19 Serology Study
- James Liley, University of Edinburgh/Alan Turing Institute – Predicting emergency admissions in the Scottish population
- Carl Marincowitz, University of Sheffield – Accuracy of telephone triage for predicting adverse outcome in suspected COVID-19: An observational cohort study
- Claudio Fronterre, Lancaster University – A spatial time series modelling approach for tracking COVID-19 cases in England at the Lower Tier Local Authorities level
Find out more about this prize, highly commended applications, and view the selection committee here.
Congratulations to all, and thanks to everyone who nominated a Team of the Year or Impact of the Year or applied to do a Lightning Talk at HDR UK’s Scientific Conference.