The day began with a welcome from Director Professor KJ Patel, who reflected on the WIMM’s vibrant community and achievements over the past year, including scientific milestones, new spinouts, sustainability progress, and public engagement initiatives. He also shared updates on training opportunities, research facilities, and major funding successes across the institute. This was followed by a brief talk from the Oxford University Innovation team, highlighting opportunities for translating discoveries through consulting, licensing, and spinouts.
In the first session, the four finalists for the Ita Askonas Medal presented their PhD research projects. The finalists were Roman Doll (Davies Group), Ayesha Ejaz (Higgs Group), Colleen McGregor (Simmons Group) and Ana Dopico-Fernandez (Milne Group). These were selected by a panel of judges on Student Presentation Day on Monday 19th May – a day on which the panel were highly impressed by the quality of science presented by all students. All four finalists gave fantastic talks on WIMM Day.
The scientific programme continued with sessions featuring talks on research areas such as mechanisms of genome mutation, the evolutionary roots of autoimmune conditions and the development of new cancer therapies.
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Throughout the day, the poster sessions were a lively hub of discussion, showcasing research projects from across the WIMM community, covering topics from spatial transcriptomics and cancer modelling to chromatin structure and iron metabolism.
The 11th Weatherall Lecture was delivered by Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, Chief Scientific Advisor at Novo Nordisk A/S. Her talk, "GLP-1: Lessons Learned and New Horizons for Therapeutic Innovation", bridged fundamental science and translational medicine.
Professors KJ Patel and Andi Roy closed the day with heartfelt thanks to speakers, session chairs, organisers, and attendees. They also announced the winners of the annual awards:
The McMichael Medal for Mentorship was awarded jointly to Ewa Gogola and Abdullah Khan. The award is named after Prof Sir Andrew McMichael, who in 2006 received the Nature Lifetime Achievement Award for mentoring in science.
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The Ita Askonas Prize for best student presentation was awarded to Roman Doll for his talk “Conferring and eliminating selective advantages via genome editing to treat myeloproliferative neoplasms”.
The winners of the 2025 WIMM Public Engagement Awards were selected by a panel of judges from across the WIMM using nominations from the WIMM community of people/teams they believed made a significant contribution to public engagement in the last year, which were reviewed by a panel of judges from across the WIMM. Third prize was awarded to Andrea Rodriguez Delherbe. Second prize was awarded to Carla Cohen and to the team of Hans Ng and Dale Maxwell. Finally, Lisa Leinhos was awarded first prize.
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Following evaluation by a dedicated panel of judges, three poster winners were selected for WIMM Day 2025:
3rd place: Eleni Louka (Mead Group)
2nd place: Sam Garforth (Bannard Group)
1st place: Alexander Redmond (Rehwinkel Group)
The final set of prizes on WIMM Day were awarded to the winners of the 2025 WIMM Image Competition, in which members of the WIMM were invited to showcase their creativity. Entries were divided into two categories:
- Eureka! – for images highlighting scientifically meaningful data/observations from research at the WIMM
- SciArt – for particularly visually striking or beautiful images
In the Eureka! category, runner-up prizes were awarded to Patrik Risteski and Antonio Rodriguez-Romera. First prize was awarded to Lauren Murphy for “Signal in the Smallest Blood Cells”. In the SciArt category, runner-up prizes were awarded to Lisa Leinhos and Dimitrios Ioannidis, with first prize awarded to Vy Lai for “Jurassic Gut”
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