The Student Voice Essay 2018
This year Medics4RareDiseases are once again proud to support Findacure to capture The Student Voice. The competition is open to undergraduate and masters students around the world in all subjects, though it is most applicable to medical and biosciences students. It poses three questions that encourage you to think about the patient experience of rare diseases, and the ways that doctors and researchers can improve it. A winning essay will be selected for each question, with one essay chosen as the overall winner and securing a publication in a respected journal. Read the story behind last year’s winning essay here. Find out more about the competition here.
The Prizes
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The overall winner of the competition will have their essay published in Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases to mark Rare Disease Day 2019
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Runners up will all have the opportunity to feature in BMC’s On Medicine blog
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Cash prizes for the winner and the runners up
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The authors of the winning essay in each category will receive a free ticket to Findacure’s Drug Repurposing for Rare Diseases Conference in February 2019, where they will receive their certificate
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The winner will be invited to speak atM4RD’s annual symposium at The Royal Society of Medicine on 20th February 2019
Phenotate
Phenotate is a phenotype crowdsourcing project for genetic diseases, developed at the SickKids Hospital in Toronto. Essentially the project is all about annotating diseases with their phenotypes. Just in case it’s slipped your mind…phenotypes iare the observable characteristics (signs & symptoms) of an individual or disease. Phenotate is crowdsourcing phenotypic labels with contributions from students and researchers as part of the team’s efforts to improve differential diagnosis software, as well as to gain computable phenotypic data for genetic diseases that can be used in research. By labelling phenotypes for genetic diseases, you can help drive Phenotate’s understanding of these debilitating illnesses from a computational standpoint, eventually benefiting patients around the world.
Competition Time!
For a limited time only, submit an annotation for frontotemporal lobar degeneration and have a chance to win an Echo Dot or a £15 iTunes gift card. Plus triple your chances by also annotating juvenile amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Find out more on the competition website.
M4RD Clinical Ambassadors
Coming Soon!
We would like a team of M4RD Clinical Ambassadors to represent us and help spread the word about the importance of rare diseases among fellow clinicians. We hope to have Ambassadors at different levels of training from medical students to consultants. This would be a great leadership opportunity and you would be able to help direct the work of M4RD. So please watch this space for more information and sign up to our mailing list to make sure you’re always the first to know about #rare opportunities.