Until next year, @RoyalFizzbin, @wytamma, @mozztacular, @Asad_Prodhan, @mozammel47, @BioElogy, and @ClaraMauri7531 out!

This year, our best question awards go to Raquel, Ellen, Michelle, Maree, Wytamma, Jackie, and (with TWO top questions) Seweryn! We'll be in touch soon to get you your merch 🥳

The #MicroSeq2026 Innovation in Bioinformatics Award goes to Daniel McKnight, who presented an automated pipeline for molecular diagnostic assay design and evaluation! Our field depends on creative, innovative minds like yours. Congratulations Daniel! #MicroSeq2026

The people have spoken: Best Lightning Talk goes to Olivia Aitkens and Best Medium Talk goes to George Bouras. Congratulations George and Olivia, it was a pleasure listening to your talks! #MicroSeq2026

Our Australasian Virology Society Award for Best Virology Talk goes to @mjohnpayne! Congratulations Michael, a fantastic presentation on some awesome #virology research. Thank you @AusVirologySoc for making this prize possible. #MicroSeq2026

Next up, our Australian Society for Microbiology Awards! Best Lightning Talk goes to @TarasenkoAnita, and Best Medium Talk to Véronique Paris again! Thanks to @AUSSOCMIC for sponsoring these prizes, and congratulations to Véronique and Anita! Very well-deserved. #MicroSeq2026

The very first Outstanding Outreach Award goes to… Véronique Paris, who presented their work on how community engagement has strengthened her research on mosquito genomics and public health. Fantastic work & congratulations winner! #MicroSeq2026

🏆It’s Prize Time!🏆 #MicroSeq2026 has lots of prizes on offer, generously sponsored by @AUSSOCMIC, @AusVirologySoc, and Microbial Genomics #MGen. Not to mention, some real cool merch on offer for our best questions from each session! 🥳

But you don't have to navigate this alone. Finding a diverse range of mentors for different parts of your career will be invaluable. Perhaps you even found one or two members of your "mentor mosaic" at #MicroSeq2026? 😉

Ebony suggests treating networking like another research project! No matter what your goals are after your PhD or first post-doc, building your network is critical for all of them 🤝

There are countless ways to get creative about sharing our science beyond research articles and scientific conferences, and many communities beyond academic ones that are just as (if not more) curious about your work!

@ebony_monson is #MicroSeq2026’s very first Outreach Keynote speaker 📢 A true expert and role model in science communication, Ebony posits that “your science is too interesting to stay in the lab” - and what we can do about it!

Session 2.4 is about to start - our FINAL session for #MicroSeq2026 😭 This session is chaired by Jackie Mahar and we’re being treated to a plenary talk by Dr @ebony_monson. After that - prizes! 🏅

🧬Raquel Cooper closes out our ECR talks for #MicroSeq2026 with valuable insights into reproducibility and consistency of #WGS despite years of changes in wet lab workflows, #sequencing technologies, and #bioinformatic pipelines. What a positive note to end on!