News
John Bell and Lisa Riedmayr win inaugural ESGCT PPE Award
ESGCT is delighted to announce that the first ever winners of the ESGCT Public and Patient Engagement Award are John Bell (Uniersity of Ottawa) and Lisa Riedmayr (Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich). There were many excellent applications for the award and the judges were very impressed by the PPE work undertaken by ESGCT's members. Among established researchers, John Bell's application stood out for setting "an inspiring and impactful standard in patient engagement in research", mainly through his work as the scientific director of BioCanRx. Lisa Riedmayer is a PhD student whose application stood out among the early career researchers as "her approach to real engagement, involving people in conversation and debate is refreshing and exciting".
John Bell
Dr. John Bell is a Senior Scientist with The Ottawa Hospital and Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Ottawa. He heads the Canadian Oncolytic Virus Consortium, a Terry Fox funded group that is developing virus based cancer therapeutics and is the Director of the Biotherapeutics Program for the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. He is the Scientific Director of BioCanRx, Canada’s Immunotherapy Network, and a Network Of Centres of Excellence. Dr. Bell is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Lisa Riedmayr
Lisa Riedmayr is a Fast-track student at the Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences and a PhD candidate at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. One of her major goals is to reduce the communication gap between scientists and the broad public. To achieve this, she participated as a speaker in several science outreach events like the Soapbox Science event in Munich, where she informed pedestrians about her research. In 2018, she developed and organised her own science outreach event: a student science day informing more than 200 high school students about the importance of science and the potential danger of science myths.