2015 Winner - Katy Irving, HRW

EPHMRA is delighted to announce the winner of the Jack Hayhurst (JH) Award for Best Paper at Conference in June. Katy Irving from HRW has won the award for her paper entitled 'Through the looking glass: a case study of Heads up Technology in oncology patient research'.

There were 13 papers eligible for the JH Award this year (many more than in 2014) and competition was extremely fierce, as the overall quality of papers this year was outstanding. All eligible papers were presented by speakers who had gone through a rigorous selection process by the Programme Committee in the Autumn 2014 and Spring 2015.

All eligible papers were judged by a ‘Best Paper’ Judging Panel for the JH Award, comprising of 7 judges, drawn from Pharma companies, Agencies and the Conference Programme Committee, using a pre-defined set of judging criteria. These criteria covered the delivery of the presentation itself; the overall value provided by the paper to delegates and an overall score for the presentation. Presentations were videoed at the conference and judges reviewed all papers alongside the presentation slides.

EPHMRA is also very pleased to announce the runners up for this award - Christoph Petersen and Cathrine Schoss from Roche Pharma AG for their paper entitled ‘Hey, I’ve seen this guy before’ - are we representative enough in pharmaceutical research?'

The Best Paper judging panel deliberated long and hard about the winners of the 3rd place and decided that there were 2 papers of equally high quality this year. They therefore awarded 3rd place jointly to 2 papers - to Emma D’Arcy from SERMO for her paper entitled 'Beyond the social media hype - new, next, now for physicians and pharma' and to Steve Martino and John Surie from M Health for their paper entitled 'Constellation Studies: Triangulating the Truth'.

All the scores for each paper were amalgamated and discussed by the Best Paper Judging Panel earlier this month and there was much debate about the papers - especially as scores were very close. It proved to be an exciting conclusion to a very busy summer for our judges.

There will be more information about our winners in the December EPHMRA News but EPHMRA would like to congratulate all our winners on their achievement.

EPHMRA would also like to thank the Best Paper Judging Panel for the JH Award for giving their time to reviewing all the papers over the summer. They are listed below:

• Hilary Worton - Aequus Research
• Thomas Hein - EPHMRA President and Thermo Fisher Scientific
• Bernd Heinrichs - Grünenthal
• Alex West - Instar Research
• Gareth Phillips - Ipsos Healthcare
• Martin Schlaeppi - Praxis Research
• Sarah Phillips - Prescient Market Research