Many of you know that I have been responsible for arranging the review of posters competing for the Best Poster Award in many issues of the HPLC Symposium series and other separation science symposia since 2008. My last involvement with the HPLC Symposium series was with HPLC 2019 Milano three years ago. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, HPLC 2020 has been postponed for two years as is HPLC2021 Düsseldorf now in 2023.
The HPLC 2022 San Diego symposium chair, Prof. Frantisek Svec has invited me to be a member of the organizing committee with the special duty of arranging the poster reviews to establish the best presented.
For several private reasons, I could not attend the symposium in person. Still, I accepted the challenging task to organize the review of posters participating in the Best Poster Award. I have found Dr. Jiri Urban of Masaryk University of Czech Republic as my onsite representative in San Diego. Together we managed the review process.
After the HPLC symposium in Milano, I received several reactions for improvement regarding the make-up of the posters. A particular cunning suggestion was received from Prof. Annelie Kruve from Finland which can be reviewed here (which I strongly recommend). I was very tempted to mandate participants in the BPA to use the template described in the video. Since such a template to present posters at the HPLC Symposium series is a paradigm change, the symposium chair regarded it as too demanding for the participants. But we agreed on a mandatory template for the posters participating in the BPA. This template can be retrieved here.
Despite the clear conditions for participation in the BPA described on the HPLC2022 website, several poster authors did not use the template. Others checked the option to participate in the BPA without noticing or intending to participate. Consequently, the list of registered participants was weeded out and several contributions were removed. Eventually, about 180 poster contributions remained for participation in the BPA.
The BPA was exclusively sponsored and supported by Agilent Technologies. Funding for ten awards of 500 USD each was provided. Therefore, the full set of posters was divided into ten groups. Each group was reviewed by three peers who were asked to nominate one poster from their set for the award. The reviews were scheduled for one day's poster session. One must realize that the quality of the posters does not distribute homogeneously over the sample set. So, it may well be that one group has the two best posters, and another group may have none. But it would be too laborious a process to do a finer evaluation with more samples or in two rounds.
Eventually, thirty-two peers helped with the reviews.
The awards were presented by Dr. Jiri Urban, Dr. Jade Byrd of Agilent, and the symposium chair Prof. Frantisek Svec during the honorary session on June 23. Please take the names of the winners and further details from the PDF copy of the award presentation here. A photo of the poster prize winners is added below (names to be added).
At the HPLC 2023 symposium, I accepted the duty of arranging the poster review for the BPA. Therefore, please send me your suggestions for further improvement of the BPA review to be of value for the next HPLC meeting.