Carlos wins European best poster prize in great competition

The FEMS MICRO 2025 poster prize was awarded to Carlos Hernández-Ortego, PhD at the Department of Molecular Biology at Umeå University, by the FEMS journal microLife. Pictured left, Dr Clare Taylor presenting the award. 

ImageLiza Holiarchuk

I had never won a poster prize before

How does it feel?

“When they first announced the winners in the morning of the last day via email I did not believe my eyes, but I was happy! I did see a sticker on my poster from one of the FEMS journals when I went to remove my poster, apparently, they are interested in publishing our data. This was a good indication, but I still did not expect to get a prize. There were more than 1200 posters, and I had never won a poster prize before, so I thought the chances would be minimal.”

“They gave seven prices; one awarded for each of the FEMS different scientific journals. Mine was FEMS microLife.”

What was your poster about?

“In my poster I tried to summarise my PhD project that I have been working on for the last four years. It is about our discovery of how intestinal bacteria can degrade extracellular ATP, a powerful proinflammatory molecule. We discovered the enzymes responsible for the eATP degradation pathway, and we characterised exactly how they degrade eATP to hypoxanthine. We also showed the implications using mutants and cell cultures. Currently we are also expanding to in vivo mouse models."

"I think people enjoyed the story because it is well structured and an (almost) completed story. People can easily see the gap in the current knowledge about the topic, and how we filled it with our data. It is also a rather basic research topic, focused on basic knowledge of bacterial physiology, which can attract people from all different fields, in contrast to more specific, more applied kind of science. Our data has potential implications in health, natural environment or industry. Importantly, we have a lot of data on the topic, so most of the questions and concerns of the jury could be addressed.“

How have you worked to visualize and communicate your research on the poster?

“I made my poster during the course Visualize your Science, a renowned science communication course in Sweden. They are quite successful at helping people generate high-quality posters. The course was very helpful in providing me feedback and advice. In general, I would say that the best way to go when creating a poster is to ask for feedback from a lot of different people. They will always have some useful input on what is unclear or not looking good."

"Since my project has a lot of data, the decision of what to include and what to leave out on the poster was a big challenge. I tried minimizing the amount of “noise”, keeping things simple, not saturating the poster with data. When you spend half a year to generate a figure, you of course want to add it, but maybe it is detrimental for the whole flow or understanding of the poster. To be able to kill your darlings is important.”

What do you think stood out in your poster?

“Most posters nowadays have beautiful layout and nice colours. Young researchers are good at those things.  For me, I had to learn design by force, attending courses and looking for examples. I think the winning point was actually my presentation of the poster. Presenting has always felt natural to me. I think the way I explain the data, very simplified and trying to avoid overcomplicated experiments or terms made people engaged and appreciating the poster a lot more. Additionally, not learning what you are going to say by heart and improvise instead, helps to keep things very casual, so people are more relaxed and feel more encouraged to ask questions."

"I did talk to a lot of people during the poster presentation, and it looked like most of them were interested.”

What was the biggest benefit for you with presenting a poster about your research?

“I got to know some research teams that work on similar things as my group at Umeå University and we had interesting discussions. I also exchange contact information with them; in case we want to do a collaborative work together. I had long discussions with PIs and journal editors who were interested. To summarise, it was a great opportunity to make new contacts and find new possible collaborators."