Cell-Cell Communication Prize

The winners of the first Cell-Cell Communication Prize for early career scientists (2022) are:

Cassandra Burdziak (Advisor: Dana Pe’er) Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Patrick Schriek (Advisors: Justine Mintern and Jose Villadangos) University of Melbourne, Australia

Richard Giadone (Advisor: Lee Rubin) Harvard University

The prize will be equally shared.

All the applications contained valuable contributions. To acknowledge this fact, we wish to invite all the applicants and their advisors to be co-authors in a white paper including a summary of the ideas submitted and contributions from other invited experts.

We plan to organize future prizes, and the present applicants and their advisors will be invited to participate in the next vote for the winning submission. We intend the initiative to represent the views of the community and not just those of the initial organizers. It is also important to consider that it is very common in science for some innovative ideas not to be initially the most popular. It is likely that only an integration of multiple approaches will emerge as the best strategy.

This website has already attracted considerable interest, with 1,508 unique visitors from 51 different countries spending time reading the material, as of October 24, 2022. We will invite scientific leaders of this field to present their views in the Forum, in some cases in the form of interviews. Several interviews will be posted soon. You should feel free to suggest suitable names or, if you prefer, to invite them or interview them yourself.

Many thanks to all the participants in the first Cell-Cell Communication Prize for early career scientists.
We received 32 applications, which can be seen in the Forum (26 under Frontiers, 3 under Big Questions and 3 under General Discussion).

A Prize has been given to the best contribution to the study of cell-cell communication from early career scientists (students or postdocs).

These contributions can be submitted to any category in the Forum on this website.

Students and postdocs from any Institution worldwide are welcome to apply.

Scientists within 5 years of their PhD or MD and not yet in Faculty positions will be considered equivalent to postdocs and are also eligible to apply.

The deadline for consideration for the Prize is September 30, 2022.

You should aim to submit by the end of the day (midnight) in your time zone. The time information was added at a late stage, so if you submit by midnight in our location (California) it is also acceptable.
If you experience technical problems on the website close to the deadline, please email your contribution and later submit to the Forum when the system comes back to normal.

The Prize will include an award of 5,000 US dollars.

Indicate your name and Institution at the beginning of the Forum contribution and write in brackets after your name if you are student or postdoc.

Only the first 3 submissions to the Forum from each early career scientist will be considered for the Prize.

The contributions can have co-authors, in this case the Prize will be shared.

The contributions can have co-authors that are not early career scientists, but the Prize will only be shared by the early career team members.

The maximum length for a contribution is two pages.

Shorter contributions are welcome. Participants might contact the authors of other contributions and form teams for more advanced joint submissions (respecting the maximum limit of 3 contributions).

We encourage you to mention how your ideas will connect with other approaches and lead to a broader understanding of cell-cell communication.

A suggested structure for the submissions might include the following sections, but you are free to omit some if not appropriate in your case:

Title

Problem or question being addressed
Rationale for your approach
Details of suggested approach
How it will affect the broader field
References

Recognition will be given to all worthy submissions, beyond the Prize winner. Your ideas will attract the attention of well-known senior scientists, including the Advisors of this initiative. We will keep a permanent record of all submissions so that you might also receive credit for them in the future. You will join a community of innovators and you will contribute an important building block to an effort that will benefit scientists and society.