With the 2024 ICIS Young Investigator Awards recently announced, Signals+ Editorial Board Member, Maialen Sebastian-delaCruz, took the opportunity to catch up with some of the YI Award Winners of past years and asked them to share their experiences and describe the impact this award had in their careers.
For some it helped connect with other ICIS members and thus extend their network and promote collaborations. This is the case of Iolanda Miceli, a MD-PhD student in the Rheumatology Research Laboratory of Dr Sarah Jones at Monash in Melbourne, who won the ICIS-Pfizer Junior Investigator Award at Cytokines 2023. She said that “this award actually resulted in many new industry connections”. Besides, Dr Zhenyu Zhong, Assistant Professor in the Department of Immunology at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who won the Milstein Young Investigator Award at Cytokines 2020, said that this award “has tremendously helped open new avenues for advocating my research and fostering collaborative activities during and after the meeting”. Similarly, Dr David Olagnier, Associate Professor in the Biomedicine Department at Aarhus University in Denmark who received ICIS-Regeneron New Investigator Award for Excellence in Cytokine & Interferon Research (former Milstein Young Investigator Award) at Cytokines 2022, commented that “the award has facilitated networking opportunities with esteemed scientists, researchers, and professionals within and outside my field” and that “these connections have opened doors to collaborations, mentorship opportunities, and access to resources that have been invaluable for my professional development”.
Dr Olagnier also stated that the international recognition by this award opened many doors to him, due to gained visibility, and that “it enhanced my professional profile and opened up new career opportunities”. Moreover, he added “it has led to invitations to speak at conferences, serve on panels, and participate in prestigious scientific committees”. Dr Edward Chuong, Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Dr Ruth Franklin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University and Department of Immunology at Harvard Medical School, received the same recognition a year later, at Cytokines 2023, and both agreed with Dr Olagnier. Dr Chuong mentioned that “As a new investigator, recognition by international awards like this are a huge help for becoming established and making my research known to more people”. Alike, Dr Franklin said that “this award has brought visibility to my work through both the invited talk at the ICIS meeting and posts on social media” and as an example she noted that “when they published a preprint on the presented work a few months after the conference, I felt that it was noticed more due to my larger network”, remarking that “visibility is so important early in your independent career!”
These awards also are a huge encouragement for young researchers as they “strongly helped me to build my confidence to good science in the future”, as Dr Chao Yang (Max) declared. He won the Amanda Proudfoot Tribute Award Winner for Advances in Chemokine Biology by a Trainee at Cytokines 2023, and this award helped him find his current faculty position back is China, where he is Associate Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xianyang City. Likewise, Jihyung Yu, a graduate student and PhD candidate in Prof. You-Me Kim’s laboratory at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon (Korea) who received the ICIS-Pfizer Junior Investigator Award at Cytokines 2023, mentioned that while working on her research “it was challenging to gauge how much impact my work could have on others” beyond her interest, and hence she “personally is proud that this award serves as evidence that other researchers find my work interesting”.
Altogether, all of them agreed that winning these awards have had a very positive impact on their careers and they are beyond grateful to the ICIS and the sponsor, for these prestigious award recognitions.