Dr. Janet Hill
President, Canadian Society of Microbiologists

December 31, 2019

Dr. Hill,

I would like to express my gratitude to the CSM for funding providing funding to support student awards at the Vibrio 2019 meeting which was held at McGill University from November 18 – 21, 2019. This was the first time that this conference was held in Canada and I am pleased to report that it was a success with 130 attendees from 23 different countries in participation.

As promised when we requested support the CSM funding was used to provide prize money to the winners of our student awards competition. Ultimately, we ended up leveraging the original funding from CSM to approach other organizations (ASM, McGill University, and the University of Guelph) and we were able to raise a total of $2600 for prize money for our competitions. Students were selected for the competition based on their submitted abstracts. Ten students were chosen to present 15-minute talks in the oral competition, and thirteen students presented posters in the poster competition. Winners were selected based on the advice of the International Vibrio Science Committee, as well as three People’s Choice Awards that were awarded based on popular opinion from the attendees by anonymous ballet. Funds were awarded as follows:

1st Place Oral Presentation - $500 (Jane Newman)
2nd Place Oral Presentation - $300 (Yasmin Dar)
3rd Place Oral Presentation - $200 (Cameron Lloyd)

1st Place Poster Presentation - $500 (Gwendolyn Gregory)
2nd Place Poster Presentation - $300 (Laura Cutugno)
3rd Place Poster Presentation - $200 (Carla Hernandez)

People’s Choice Award (Oral) - $200 (Landon Getz)
People’s Choice Award (Oral II) - $200 (Cameron Hubert)
People’s Choice Award (Poster) - $200 (Julia Mougin)

All awards included the cash prize (which were given as cash and were amazingly fun to hand out) a framed certificate on which was inscribed the student’s name, my signature, and the title “Canadian Society of Microbiologists Student Competition.” When the symposium started it was introduced using this title and the benefits of joining CSM were mentioned orally during the introduction of the symposium. The CSM logo was also included on all conference labelling.

Thank you for supporting our conference, I look forward to seeing you in Guelph this spring.