ABRF 2015: Outstanding Scientific Poster Awards.

With the continuing mission of providing significant educational opportunities to the ABRF membership, the Education Committee (EdComm) has a proud heritage of overseeing the Water’s Research Poster competition for the annual meeting. The competition is open to all and includes scientific reports from academia as well as cutting-edge research from core facilities and corporate research and development groups. The goal of offering the awards is to elicit the highest level of information on techniques, applications, and technologies and share knowledge pertinent to further excellence in core facility services. The process for judging the poster submissions begins with the author submitting an abstract on-line during the registration procedure. The author chooses a submission category and self-selects whether to be considered for competition. Each abstract is reviewed by at least 3 members of the Education Committee based upon on the following criteria adapted from the Annual BioMedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS): development of an hypothesis or statement of the problem, description of methods and controls, clarity in the presentation of results, a conclusion that summarizes the results, and impact of the results to the core facility mission. The entire committee comes to a consensus with regard to the semifinalists. All semifinalists must agree to give a short oral presentation during the poster review session for the EdComm and give a 15-min talk at a regular meeting session if they win. During the annual meeting, teams of EdComm members circulate through the poster session and evaluate the semifinalist presentations. The metrics used for evaluating abstracts also contain information on how to judge (rank) each of the 3 additional aspects determined during the designated poster presentation: clarity of the poster presentation, originality and contribution to the core facility, and oral presentation. Four finalists are ultimately selected. Competition has provided the ABRF membership with excellent posters to enjoy during the annual meeting. The presentation by finalists during the annual meeting is an opportunity to obtain further information on the science behind the poster.