It is our great pleasure to announce our 2023 PSI Award winners!
PSI Rising Star Award
PSI are delighted to announce a new award for 2023 – the PSI ‘Rising Star’ Award. This award is designed to recognise the impact of PSI volunteers who are in the early stages of their career (<10 years pharma experience). These individuals are our ‘ones to watch’ in the PSI space and we want to congratulate and encourage their continued involvement with PSI.
Along with this recognition, the winner will receive a free one day pass to the next annual PSI conference, to share their contributions so far and to inspire the next generation in their PSI journey.
The PSI Directors were thrilled to announce the first winner of the PSI Rising Star award at the 2023 conference as Tom Burnett. Tom joined the Scientific Committee in 2018 and has spent the last five years making a big impact. Tom is currently a lecturer at the University of Bath and is a real advocate for what he believes is the essential link between the pharmaceutical industry and academia. Tom regularly discusses the benefits of PSI with his students, which in turn helps to promote our industry to a new generation of statisticians.
Tom plays a huge role in the Young Statisticians session and social every year at conference, suggests a huge variety of topics for the Scientific Committee to discuss, volunteers to speak at conference every year and even provides training courses to members. Tom was also instrumental in getting Thomas Jaki to speak at the 2022 PSI Conference, a keynote speech which was enjoyed by all.
Recipient of Honorary Membership
The board were also delighted to present Nigel Howitt with an honorary PSI membership at the recent conference. This is the highest award PSI can bestow on one of its members to recognise outstanding service on behalf of PSI and its membership, sustained over many years.
Nigel has been actively involved with PSI since joining in 1994. From the early 2000’s Nigel was a member of the scientific committee and served for the first time on the BoD between 2005 and 2011. He then re-joined the BoD in 2015, serving as vice chair between 2016 – 2017, and as chair from 2017 – 2019, steering PSI towards a growth in European members. Nigel then held the role of vice chair again from 2019 – 2020.
Since stepping down from the board, Nigel immediately re-joined the PSI membership committee and continues to show his passion and in-depth knowledge for PSI by supporting the recruitment of PSI volunteers.
Mick Godley Award - 2023
Every year we acknowledge a PSI member who has gone above and beyond and made significant contributions to PSI with the Mick Godley Award. This award gives a PSI member a free pass to a future conference of their choice.
It was really hard to pick a winner as we have so many PSI members who are in a word ‘brilliant’. But the BoD agreed that this year’s winner would be Claire Brittain.
Claire has done a huge amount to inspire the next generation of statisticians and programmers in the industry. She has been the driving force for a huge number of careers activities, working within the CALC team to deliver numerous careers talks and taking the lead on various careers events. Claire was a pioneer in starting the school workshop events and many initiatives that she started continue to be utilized by the Careers team. Claire also spearheaded the creation of the Careers section of the website.
Claire is a huge advocate for MSc funding both within the industry and PSI, and a champion for placement students, encouraging them to get involved with PSI and to join its various committees. Thanks to Claire, PSI has a pipeline of energized volunteers!
More recently, Claire has taken on leading the new ‘Lunch and Learn’ webinars and taken these to the next level in terms of topics, fantastic facilitation of discussions and really bringing a new approach to highlighting some key (often overlooked) topics within the industry. Claire also regularly presents at the PSI conference and is one of the most ‘creative’ communicators within the PSI community.
Mick Godley Award - 2022
In 2022, the Mick Godley Award was presented to Emma Crawford.
Emma was recognised for her huge contribution to the PSI Careers Fair, which she researched, organized and facilitated in 2021 and 2022. Emma has been the driving force behind getting this event to happen each year and puts a huge amount of effort into making this event a success (along with any others she is involved in).
Emma had to facilitate moving this event online during the Covid years, which took a huge amount of work. Emma liaised with Careers Fair Plus to make this event accessible and engaging online. The technicalities of using an online platform required a lot of additional work behind the scenes to make sure that this worked seamlessly for exhibitors and students alike.
Emma has been a valuable contributor and leader of many CALC events and initiatives over the many years she has been on the committee and brings tremendous energy to everything she does. In 2023, Emma will be working on the development of the schools outreach programme as the Careers team resume focus on this as a key area.
The Directors would once again like to congratulate all of the winners and to thank them for their impactful contributions. We cannot wait to see what you do next for PSI!
