The tip of the iceberg and beyond: Here's to all those who enable health professional education

Abstract

Where does the time go?! As we move into the latter parts of 2025, another great meeting of the Association for the Study of Medical Education brings the announcement of our annual award winners. I am thrilled, as a result, to again share news about groups that made particularly strong contributions to Medical Education this past year. Of course, these individuals are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the many to whom we are grateful for enabling such a stimulating field of scholarship, but these successes stood out.

Harrison C Lucas, Jeffrey S Upperman and Jamie R Robinson received the Silver Quill Award, granted annually to the article that is downloaded most often, for their paper entitled A systematic review of large language models and their implications in medical education.¹ The Henry Walton Prize, similarly awarded for Really Good Stuff papers, went to Billy Ho Hung Cheung, Calvin Cheung, Jason Chan, Emmanuel Chun Ka Wong, Joshua Wing Kei Ho and Kui Kai Gary Lau for their work entitled Synergy and collaboration with young educators and students: Insights from an open forum on generative artificial intelligence in medical education.² I suppose it is no surprise that Artificial Intelligence appears to have been the topic of the year, but seeing those two winners suggests this to be a useful moment to draw attention to the journal's perspective, summarised at the bottom of the Author Guidelines at mededuc.com, for those who have not already seen it.³

Moving from artificial to real intelligence, we were again fortunate to derive insight from the dedication and wisdom of over 850 peer reviewers.^{4, 5} For lifetime contributions, the Peer Reviewer Hall of Fame at mededuc.com has been updated. For the past year, we offered Choice Critics Awards to a few individuals who were especially active and influential. This year's winners are Danette McKinley (National Conference of Bar Examiners, US), Jill Morrison (University of Glasgow, Scotland), Ligia Ribeiro (University Medical Centre Groningen, the Netherlands), Megan Brown (Imperial College London, England) and Stuart Pattinson (University of Witwatersrand, South Africa). Honorary mention also goes out to the dozens of people who have signed onto the Really Good Stuff (RGS) reviewer panel, enabling RGS to now be published monthly rather than bi-annually.⁶

I am personally excited to have the opportunity to work with the 13th cohort of editorial interns: Takedza Munangatire (University of Namibia, Namibia), Marwa Schumann (Charité University of Medicine, Germany) and You You (Peking University, China). In exchange for our editors going beyond the call of duty to support interns to develop their understanding of journal operations, we annually ask them to pay forward, into their home regions, whatever insights they gain. So, we encourage you to reach out to any alumni from the programme (see mededuc.com) if you desire further guidance. You can also connect directly with the editors for advice by using the ‘Ask Us Anything’ link on the same website.

And, last but not least, we are delighted to announce that Madawa Chandratilake from the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka is this year's recipient of the Medical Education Developing Scholarship Award. He will be working with colleagues to develop a project entitled ‘Strengthening national capacity for health professions education research in Sri Lanka: A strategic collaborative initiative’ that we greatly look forward to seeing succeed.

While we celebrate ‘the tip of the iceberg’, congratulations and thanks to all who continue to take Medical Education, and the field of health professional education more generally, from strength to strength.