2.4.1 Thomas C Chalmers Award

Thomas C Chalmers MD

Throughout his career, Tom was an outspoken advocate of randomised trials, whether at the bedside, at professional meetings, in class, or in situations pertaining to his own life. After his diagnosis of prostate cancer in 1993, he insisted that he only receive treatment in the context of a clinical trial. Fortunately, there was an ongoing trial at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in which he enrolled. Over the course of his illness, he delighted in quizzing and lecturing the residents and physicians caring for him about the evidence for their tests and interventions. He loved to teach, frequently using argument as a device. His creativity spanned his entire career, influencing clinicians and methodologists alike. He is perhaps best known for the notion ‘randomise the first patient’, his belief that it is more ethical to randomise patients than to treat them in the absence of good evidence.

In his later years, in arguably his most important work, Tom and his colleagues showed that, had information from RCTs been systematically and cumulatively synthesised, important treatments such as thrombolytic therapy for myocardial infarction would have been recognised as useful earlier. In addition, he demonstrated that the advice given in textbooks and review articles published over the same period of time did not correspond to the available evidence, even fifteen years after an intervention’s effect had been well characterised.

The Thomas C Chalmers Award

The Thomas C Chalmers Award was established with individual donations to celebrate and recognise Tom’s interests, and was awarded for the first time at the 2^nd Cochrane Colloquium in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, in October 1994. The recipients receive a certificate and 1000 US dollars (to be split equally between the two recipients). Any runners-up also receive certificates.

Selection criteria for the Thomas C Chalmers Award

The Thomas C Chalmers Award is given each year to the principal authors of the best oral presentation and the best poster presentation at the Colloquium. All accepted posters and oral presentations are eligible for the Award if they address methodological issues related to systematic reviews and demonstrate:

1. originality of thought;
2. high quality science;
3. relevance for the advancement of the science of systematic reviews;
4. clarity of presentation.

The work should be presented by a junior investigator who is currently contributing to a Cochrane entity and who hasn't previously been the recipient of this Award.

Presentations are judged by the Thomas C Chalmers MD Award Committee (current Chair: Georgia Salanti). The members of the Committee are drawn from the Methods Groups of The Cochrane Collaboration. At least two members represent the Screening and Diagnostic Tests Methods Group, two members represent the Statistical Methods Group, and one member represents the Prognosis Methods Group. The Committee also aims to be geographically representative of the Collaboration. The Award is administered by the Cochrane Operations Unit  (secretariat@cochrane.org).

More details can be found on the Collaboration's website at http://www.cochrane.org/about-us/awards-scholarships-funding-initiatives/annual-prizes-and-awards/thomas-c-chalmers-award.