Words from Yousif Ahmad
Read how winning has boosted the confidence and career of 2018 winner Yousif Ahmad!
PCR’s Got Talent is a unique platform for young practitioners to improve their scientific presentation skills.
Last year’s winner was Yousif Ahmad. We asked him what the award meant to him.
When you submitted your abstract to EuroPCR, did you think you might win PCR's Got Talent?
I don’t think anybody expects to win when submitting! But my close friend and colleague Christopher Cook won in 2016, so I was able to draw on his experience and that helped.
is unique in its format, with multiple rounds and coaching sessions before each round. So I was able to keep refining my presentation skills. Those skills have been invaluable for other talks since.
Do you think winning this award has given your research exposure that it might not have otherwise had?
Absolutely! Even during the meeting, I heard my work being referenced by panellists at other sessions after they had seen me present it. Presenting in the main arena was a great honour and a much bigger platform to showcase my work than I had been used to.
Has the award helped advance your research?
Yes, winning the competition has helped me to engineer collaborations with centres interested in similar areas and I have been preparing manuscripts using pooled data from these collaborations.
Has it boosted your career?
Yes ! More than anything else, winning at EuroPCR gave me the confidence to submit my work for other prizes and awards and I won the Samuel A. Levine Young Clinical Investigator Award at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions.
Without the experience of EuroPCR in Paris earlier that year, I may not have even submitted my work for such a prestigious award. In addition, the manuscript originating from this work was published in JACC: Cardiovascular
Interventions, and was one of the Top 5 Most Read Articles in the journal in 2018. I was also awardedthe Young Author Achievement Award at the American College of Cardiology’sAnnual Scientific Sessions in New Orleans in 2019. AndI secured an extremely competitiveand prestigious international fellowship at a leadingAmerican centre, starting in July 2019. I’m sure that winning the PCR’s Got Talent award played a part in that too.
Do you have advice for young fellows who are considering submitting their work as an abstract at EuroPCR?
Firstly, you can’t succeed if you don’t put yourself forward so do submit your work. Secondly, if you are prepared participate in several rounds of open competition, then do enter PCR’s Got Talent. Finally, when preparing, give equal weight to the way you present and to the scientific content. It is the combination of well conducted, original research and your ability to communicate your message that will lead to success in the competition.
