At the annual SVEPM conference different prizes are awarded. Below the awards are posted and past winners named

Best Junior Oral Presentation (SRUC Prize)

This prize will be awarded at the annual conference for the best paper presented by a new researcher in any area of veterinary epidemiology. The prize is sponsored by the Scotland's Rural College (SRUC)  since 2012, who generously provide £200 for the prize. Authors submitting abstracts for presentation at the conference, and who fulfill the eligibility criteria (below), can request to be considered for this prize. However, please note that the number of SRUC prize candidate slots is limited, and preference is given to oral abstracts scored most highly upon blinded evaluation by the SVEPM committee.

Eligibility
To be eligible for the SRUC prize, candidates must be either:
• A PhD student
• Engaged in a post-graduate residency training
• Not more than 5 years employed in the field of (veterinary) epidemiology or veterinary public health/preventive medicine (inclusive of PhD/post-graduate residency training time)

Value
• The prize will be £200 and will be awarded for at least 5 consecutive years
• If there are no eligible candidates in any year, the prize money will be carried forward for an additional year.

Judging
• There will be 3 judges: The Senior Vice-President, Junior Vice-President and Professor George Gunn (SRUC) or his nominee from SRUC
• Judges will meet twice during the annual meeting to deliberate
• The prize will be awarded at the conference dinner on Thursday evening

Judging criteria
• Both the proceedings manuscript and oral presentation will be taken into consideration during the selection process.
• The following criteria must be met:
- Presenter’s own work
- Rigorous, novel science
- Manuscript/presentation should describe a completed piece of research with detailed methods, full results and sensible conclusions
- Presenter must demonstrate in-depth knowledge of the subject through their paper, presentation and answers to questions from audience
- The work must have a defined impact; What is the importance of the work for animal health, public health and/or welfare?

Year Winner Title of presentation
2021 Jake Thompson Randomised control trial shows space allowance increases milk production and changes behaviour of housed dairy cows
2020 No award (COVID-19)
2019 Bryony Jones Exploring local knowledge of sheep and goat disease in the pastoralist Afar region of Ethiopia: implications for peste des petits ruminants disease surveillance
2018 Timothée Vergne Nomadic movements and infectious disease transmission: tackling avian influenza viruses along the free-grazing duck movement network in Vietnam
2017 Matteo Crotta Quantitative Risk Assessment of Campylobacter in broiler chickens - assessing the level of contamination at the end of the rearing period
2016 Kaare Græsbøll How many pooled tests are needed to detect a single positive sample?
2015 Pranav Pandit Dynamic between herd model for Q fever spread in dairy herds to quantify the impact of different transmission pathways at regional scale
2014 Laura Falzon A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Factors Associated with Anthelmintic Resistance in Sheep
2013 Fernanda Dórea Syndromic surveillance in veterinary medicine using laboratory submission data - lessons learned from two systems
2012 Anne Relun Estimation of the relative impact of treatment and management factors on the prevention of digital dermatitis by survival analysis

SVEPM posters prize awarded to the three best poster presentations

There will be three different types of SVEPM poster prizes, each worth £100, to be announced by the President at the conference dinner on Thursday evening. The 2021 prizes were supported by the Society and Avia-GIS.

• Prize 1: Delegates will be provided with one voting ballot each at registration. Each delegate can vote on up to three different posters on any topic, one point per vote. The voting ballot must be handed in at the conference registration desk by Thursday before the afternoon tea and coffee break. Delegates are asked to vote for the poster author(s) with whom they have had the most interesting or thought-provoking verbal science communication related to the poster contents during the conference.

• Prize 2: The topic of the winning poster in this category will be on bridging the gap between research and decision making. The winning poster will be selected by an independent committee appointed by Avia-GIS amongst conference delegates.

• Prize 3: Any topic, judged by a group of SVEPM Committee members during the conference, according to the following criteria: scientific merit, visual impact, readability and compliance with the SVEPM poster preparation guidelines.

Hélène Cecilia Rift Valley fever virus hosts are not equal: modelling infectiousness at the individual level
Arianna Comin How can we improve? Using meat inspection data to identify beef cattle farms with potential animal health and welfare issues
Marina Meester Between-batch variability in hepatitis E virus infections in slaughter pigs points to future farm interventions

No poster prize winners, as there were no posters presented in the 2020 conference (COVID-19)

Raphaelle Metras Pilot study for smallholder poultry farms in Northern Vietnam
Nils Toft Guidelines for establishing the prevalence of paratuberculosis
Clara Marce Transmission assumptions in paratuberculosis models
Franz Brulsauer BVD prevalence in Scottish beef suckler herds
Jenny Frossling Analysis of the reproductive performance in Swedish breeding cats
Thierry Hoch Quantifying the horizontal transmission of Coxella burnetii, a causative agent of Q-fever, in dairy herds
Ruska Rimhanen-Finn Characteristics of rabies exposures in Finnish inhabitants
Darren Green Patterns of Atypical Scrapie in Great Britain
Simon Gubbins The basic reproduction number for bluetongue virus