RSTMH – 2025 in a Snapshot
As we come to the end of another year, it is both a privilege and a pleasure to reflect on what RSTMH has achieved. Across our membership, grants, meetings, events and journals, 2025 has been a year defined by connection, growth and impact.
What follows is a snapshot of the highlights from across the Society over the past year – moments that illustrate not only the scale of our work, but the people, ideas and collaborations that sit at its core.
Strategy
This year we started the third year of our five-year strategy and continued to deliver to the important aims of improving members careers, growing networks and experiences for the wider global health and tropical medicine communities and ensuring our work is evaluated and sustainable.
For the first time in at least 20 years, we finished the year with a surplus, meaning that our income covered all of our expenditure. This was an incredible achievement and is a reflection of our hard work and support from many partners, notably National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF).
Governance
This has been an important year for the governance of RSTMH. We welcomed our joint Presidents Professor Margaret Gyapong and Wendy Harrison to their second term of office and welcomed Professor Olaoluwa Pheabian Akinwale to her second term as Elected Trustee, following a vote by members and Fellows.
We also welcomed Dr Tijana Williams as our co-opted Trustee following the step down of Professor Gail Davey after many years of devoted assistance for the Society. We are extremely grateful for all of Gail’s help and support over the years as President, as Trustee and as a member of the Grants and Awards Committee.
RSTMH Team
The team at RSTMH is an extremely hard-working group of experts helping to deliver our activities in pursuit of our strategic aims and vision. This year we said goodbye to a few team members including Alice Sharman as Communications Manager, Clare McCraith as Meetings and Events Manager and Jasmine Hughes as Team and Office Assistant. We welcomed to the team Lilly Matson as Communications Manager, Bonnie Kelly as Meetings and Events Manager, who worked at RSTMH for 9 years previously. We also welcomed Indiana Dikmen as our new Executive Assistant and Thomas Harris as our Team and Office Assistant.
The team continues to deliver an incredible amount of work, and alongside our many volunteers, enables us to deliver career support, improved networks and experiences for our members and Fellows, and thousands of others within the communities of Global Health and Tropical Medicine.
Members and Fellows
Firstly, a thank you to all our members and Fellows who continue to support RSTMH, our vision, and our work.
This year, we were pleased to have welcomed new members from 80 countries.
In 2025, we expanded our offerings and networks to enhance the experience of our members and Fellows. We also ran a number of events exclusively for our members, including our Presidents’ Lecture, presented this year by Dr Magda Robalo.
Four new Presidents' Fund awardees have been welcomed into membership, a fund that gives the opportunity for individuals who otherwise may not be able to afford membership to become members and enjoy the benefits.
We also started our monthly networking sessions for all career stages, which have proven to be very popular and have brought together interested people from all over the world.
Grants
As I look back on another busy and rewarding year with the RSTMH grants programme, I’m struck by both the scale of our work and the incredible dedication of our awardees across the globe. This year has been one of growth and connection, as multiple cohorts reached important milestones in their grant journeys. We would not have been able to achieve this valuable impact without the support from our incredible donors this year – NIHR, CIFF, The International Alliance for the Control of Scabies (IACS), The Journal of Comparative Pathology Educational Trust (JCPET) and The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
Our 2023 awardees officially completed their grant journeys this year. In total, their projects spanned more than 200 research topics, tackling an extraordinary range of global health challenges. Reading through the final reports submitted as part of their projects has been inspiring; they reflect the passion and perseverance behind every project.
Meanwhile, over 300 awardees who began their projects in January as part of our 2024 cohort have spent the year delivering their research projects. As we approach the end of the year, many are wrapping up their projects and starting to work on their reports.
Our 2025 grants round marked a new milestone for RSTMH. We received a record-number of applications – 3,663 – a 30% increase on the previous year. Successful applicants from this cohort will conduct their research throughout 2026 and report back to us in 2027, and I already look forward to seeing the impact of their work.
Throughout the year, we hosted a wide range of grants-related online events, creating moments of connection for our awardees to feel part of a wider research community. We also conducted our second grant awardee workshop, in Kampala, Uganda, with Greta our RSTMH Grants Manager, for CIFF funded awardees from the region. We had a great day helping awardees form closer connections with one another and hearing from experts on a few relevant topics, as well as having the chance to attend the NNN conference for 2025.
Meetings and Events
It was a busy start to 2025 for RSTMH’s Meetings and Events team.
We celebrated the 50th anniversary for Topics in Infection, the event we deliver in partnership with Guys Health and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) which sold out thanks to our excellent speaker line up, including Professor Sir Chris Whitty talking about the past 50 years of public health interventions to reduce infections.
During the year, we ran other in person meetings including Research in Progress meeting at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the Annual Meeting, which was on AI in global health: Ethics, equity and innovation, We were very pleased to deliver many online meetings this year, which were more accessible to the majority of our members, Fellows and supporters. They include two Global Research in Progress events, several member-only networking sessions, our Presidents’ Lecture, and a snakebite webinar to celebrate our recent Special Issue on the topic
We also kicked off the planning for the ICTMM 2028 meeting taking place in Liverpool, UK. We confirmed the dates and location for the meeting, sent out our first newsletter and made a call out for those interested in being part of our Scientific Committee. Sign up here for more details.
We’re looking forward to appointing our Scientific Committee, agreeing the theme of the meeting and sending our next few newsletters full of news about the event. At our Annual Meeting we met some great attendees, heard about exciting and novel research, had insightful conversations and been inspired by some amazing speakers. It was also the platform from which we launched our Special Collection on AI in Global Health and announced our intention to launch a new journal on this topic early next year.
Medals and Awards
Every year RSTMH gives out a number of medals and awards in recognition of excellence. This year, nominations were open for four individual medal and awards.
The Medals and Awards Programme is a great way to recognise success in our area of work, from those starting out in their careers and demonstrating commitment to others behind them in the journey, to recognising career achievements.
This year's medals and award winners include Professor Kevin Marsh (Sir Patrick Manson Medal), Dr Cassandra Akinde (Emerging Leaders Award), Professor Giancarlo Biagini (Hemingway Award), Professor Joel Tarning (Chalmers Medal).
This year we were delighted to announce Morlai Sesay as the winner of the 2025 Student Essay Prize and Dr Arohi Chauhan, Dr Dominic Inaido, Vivian Philemon Mushi and Peace Oregbesan as the Presidents’ Fund awardees.
We were very aware that many of our medals and awards nominations were for male recipients, and some medals and awards had only male nominations, including our most senior medal the Sir Patrick Manson Medal. We hope to address this in future years to ensure that there is good diversity in applications across gender, location, sector, and area of health. If you know someone who you feel needs recognition for their success in global health, please keep an eye on the newsletter where we will announce the 2026 Medals and Awards process.
Volunteers
This year we recruited two new Country Ambassadors Dr Zinia Nujum in India and Dr Joab Khasewa in Kenya. Country Ambassadors are an invaluable group of experts based in and working in countries that are very important for our work. They disseminate information about our work and also provide us with advice on how best to connect with and communicate about their country.
We also welcomed 35 new Global Assessors and 11 new Student Ambassadors this year. We would not be able to deliver our global work without a network of over 1,000 volunteers, experts in their fields across the world. These roles include members of our Board of Trustees and Committees, our Student and Country Ambassadors, Global Assessors who ensure the technical quality of our work is maintained in our grants and event, and also our Editorial Board members and reviewers who maintain the quality of our two scientific journals.
Journals
A huge amount of work has gone into our journals this year.
To kick off 2025, we published a Virtual Issue ‘Addressing the snakebite challenge - progress towards the 2030 roadmap’ in January 2025, which was Guested Edited by two our Associate Editors, Maya Gopalakrishnan and Frank Tianyi. Maya and Frank then helped to host a webinar on International Snakebite Awareness Day 2025 (ISBAD ’25), which showcased work from the collection.
To celebrate World NTD Day this year, we also hosted a webinar on ‘Climate Change, Malaria, and Neglected Tropical Diseases’, based on a highly cited paper that was published in Transactions. Over 1,900 people registered to attend this event, which demonstrates the importance and interest in this topic and the benefit of knowledge sharing.
An increasing area of focus for The Society is the role AI might play in addressing global health challenges. This is something we have explored through our journal outputs, starting with the publication of a Special Collection on ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Global Health’, which we launched at our Annual Meeting.
Given the success of the Special Collection, and the incredibly range of research submitted, we also announced that we will be launching a new journal, the focus of which will be on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Global Health.
In the last few months of the year, we have published our fourth supplement with Sightsavers in International Health, ‘Sightsavers at 75 delivering impact through health and inclusion research’, as part of our ongoing dissemination partnership with them. This partnership brings awareness to projects through a variety of communications channels.
There is also a huge amount of work going on in the background of our journals, that wouldn’t be possible without the enormous effort of our editorial roles. This year, we recruited eight new Associate Editors across Transactions and International Health, whose time and dedication we are extremely grateful for.
Looking ahead to 2026
I am encouraged by the momentum we are building and the opportunities that lay ahead in the year to come. From the expansion of our events and networks, to new journal initiatives and the growing role of AI in global health, 2026 ahead promises both challenge and possibility.
Of course, none of our work would be possible without the commitment of our team and Board of Trustees, members and Fellows, volunteers, partners, and supporters, whose collective efforts continue to strengthen our global community and advance our shared mission to improve global health.