In the true spirit of a symposium, at RMBS we reward the best papers, oral presentations and posters, in particular as a way to recognize students and their efforts.
In 1970, a student paper session was established: in it, one student from each of the schools which support RMBS gives a talk on his research. These students are chosen at the last possible time preceding the conference … Because of the timing of their selection, their work is frequently more recent and up to date than that of the regular technical sessions
[from the Foreword of the 10th RMBS, 1973].
In 1989, there was a significant participation by student presenters who for the first time were competing in the K.C. Rock Memorial Award for student excellency
[from the Foreword of the 27th RMBS, 1990]. The K.C. Rock Memorial Award was presented to students until 2002 and included different awards: travel awards; 1st, 2nd and 3rd place written paper, oral presentation, and poster; best of session; and special awards. Only one award per student was presented, and the rationale behind the selection of the winner of the different awards was to give the most possible amount of money to each student. When a student was eligible for two or more awards, the award with the highest associated cash price was given to the student, until all the money allocated in the budget for the students' awards was disbursed.
In 2002, a RMBS Contest Committee was created to formalize the RMBS contest. Up to that point how the winners were selected was not as transparent as it could have been. For example, only those in the top half of the written competition were eligible for the oral presentation or poster awards, but such rule was not publicized; as a consequence in some cases the actual best
presentation or poster were not awarded any recognition because the corresponding written paper was not judged to be in the top 50% of the papers. Over the course of that year, the committee members (Dr. Srirangam Kumaresan, Dr. Elena Oggero, Dr. Guido Pagnacco, Mr. William Prushner, and Dr. Michelle Tucci) formalized the contest and its rules, which were approved by the entire Board of Directors and then implemented for the first time at the 2003 RMBS Contest.
Until 2007, students were divided into two groups based on the degree they were enrolled in: Bachelor and Master in one group, and Doctoral in the other. However, it soon became apparent that junior students were often doing a better job
than those enrolled in a terminal degree. Therefore, it was decided to unify the students in one single category, dispensing with the division by degree level.
Up to that point, students were only competitors, never judges. To increase the interaction between students and professional, and in the true spirit of a symposium, in 2009, the Professional awards (best written, oral presentation and poster) were introduced. Students became the judges of the professionals' oral presentation and poster awards, whereas the professional written papers were judged, similarly to the students, as the final step of the peer-review process of all manuscripts accepted for publication in Biomedical Sciences Instrumentation.
Over the course of the years, the organization of the scientific program for the meeting also changed: from special sessions dedicated only to students of the 1970s to unified sessions mixing students and professionals of the 2010s. This made it more difficult for the judges (whether students or not) to perform their duties: the corresponding scoring sheets only contained the appropriate category of nominations and judges were often confused as to which speakers they were to judge. Furthermore, since authors and presenters had to express their interest in participating in the contest (they were not automatically entered in the RMBS Contest), the judges wondered why some speakers were not included in the scoring sheets. For this reasons, in 2019, new rules and procedures were introduced for the RMBS Contest: all authors and presenters were automatically entered in the contest, and at the symposium all attendees judged every oral and poster presenter. This allowed the unification of the scoring sheets and avoided confusion. Only at the time of the scoring of the awards and the presentation of the awards and eventual monetary prizes were students and professionals separated into two separate groups.
With the launch of our new digital platform for Biomedical Sciences Instrumentation in late 2021, the written portion of the RMBS Contest became fully integrated with the peer-review process, and reviewers score
each paper they are reviewing as the last step of each review loop.
Visit our Contest website for the list of winners of the RMBS Contest since 2003, information about the latest and current format and the up-to-date Official Contest Rules.