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With a record number of entries this year, judges were extremely impressed with the high quality of all publications and the research they described. Our congratulations to this year's finalists:

Clinician Researcher Finalists

• Ms Brooke Bufton and Ms Kate Ingwerson: Are we opening a can of worms?': Community-based occupational therapists' experiences working with clients with unexpected mental health issues
• Dr Christine Roder: Area-level social and economic factors and the local incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infections in Victoria during 2020
• Professor Eugene Athan: Environmental risk factors associated with the presence of Mycobacterium ulcerans in Victoria, Australia
• Dr Anand Ganes: Urinary sodium concentration predicts time to major adverse coronary events and all-cause mortality in men with heart failure over a 28-33-year period: a prospective cohort study

Scientist Finalists

• Ms Rebecca Edgar: Genetic and Chemical validation of Plasmodium falciparum aminopeptidase PfA-M17 as a drug target in the hemoglobin digestion pathway
• Ms Yuan Gao: Maternal gut microbiota during pregnancy and the composition of immune cells in infancy
• Mr Nicholas Parsons: Structural-Functional Connectivity Bandwidth of the Human Brain
• Dr Moloud Abdar: UncertaintyFuseNet: Robust Uncertainty-aware Hierarchical Feature Fusion Model with Ensemble Monte Carlo Dropout for COVI D-19 Detection.

Each finalist has been invited to deliver a 5 minute presentation at the Research & Grand Round session in the HERB Lecture Theatre on Tuesday 6 December.

The winner in each category will be announced at the Barwon Health Strategic Research Symposium on Tuesday 13 December, when they will each take home a prize of $1000.

Good luck to all finalists!