Conference: Building Momentum 2026

Building Momentum 2026

Welcome to the landing page of The Beacon Conference – a confluence of research, representation and best-practice identification. During these conferences, we love to hear from our Beacon Interns about their year in the role, about your research that you’re doing and about how we as a community of budding Clinical Academics can encourage our Universities and Government into supporting us progress into delivering high-quality, evidence-based care for patients.

Register for the conference here

The deadline for abstracts is 21st August at Midnight. Please use this link to submit your abstract. Please note, you must have registered to attend for us to be able to consider your abstract for a presentation at our conference.

Please see below for the content of previous conferences we have held for an example of how to deliver a presentation or poster.

The Beacon Conference – Bridging Gaps 2024

Here, we invite students and staff from universities across the UK to celebrate success in widening participation, sharing best practice, and explore opportunities in enhancing support available for under-represented groups in higher education.

This conference was themed: Bridging Gaps. We are proud to be delivering protected internships, designed by those that they serve. We aim to break ground by not only building widening access to clinical research with input from those from these backgrounds, but by also sharing best practice to create significant strides in supporting our under-represented future clinical academics. This year’s theme was identified by last years’ conference’s fantastic expert panel discussion to identify best practice. We will be sharing these in due course.

Conference Programme Download

Our 2024 Award Winners

This year, we are proud to proclaim our award winners for Bridging Gaps 2024. We had a fantastic turnout with overwhelming feedback about the conference, and it’s all down to the hard work of the attendees – there was a huge amount of work showcased and we’re thrilled to be the venue to let others see such high-quality research.

We focused on three prizes for the conference this year – a best poster prize, a best oral presentation prize and a Beacon prize. The Beacon prize celebrates the fantastic work that people are doing in supporting those from under-represented backgrounds, pioneering the way to a better, more cohesive and diverse world of clinical academia.

Best poster prize

This work was submitted by Ms Naabil Khan, from the University of Exeter.

Bridging the gap: Skin for all and its impact on addressing racial inequalities in medical education Download

Best Oral Presentation

This work was submitted by Carolyn Thomas, from the University of Dundee.

Beacon Prize Winner

This work was submitted by Eleanor Duckett and Louisa Rees, from University of Cardiff

Beacon conference 2023 – Breaking Ground

Last year, we were proud to host our first conference at The Scarman, University of Warwick, where we explored the concept ‘Breaking Ground’. We heard from Dr Vassili Crispi on their life as an early career researcher from an LGBTQAI+ background, and Dr Mary Doherty around their experiences as a neurodivergent clinical academic. We hosted a Best Practice session where we explored accessibility, training and pastoral needs of under-represented medical students. These best practice points were then turned into these incredible pieces by our friends at Nifty Fox, to make this an accessible story for all. Finally, below we have our Breaking Ground 2023 conference programme, which we encourage all to review at their leisure.

Conference Programme – Breaking Ground 2023 Download

TALK TO US

We appreciate any and all comments and questions. If you’re looking to set up a Beacon Internship programme, become a mentor, volunteer, enquire about our work or just looking for more information, hit the button below.