Fertility 2025 Review

I am pleased to present a roundup of Fertility 2025, on behalf of the Program Organising and Awards Committee and Joint Fertility societies Program Committee. The meeting kicked off with the SRF Satellite Day which was extremely well attended, and starting with the Early Career (EC) Research Symposium. This was organised by the EC team and sponsored by the SRF Reproduction and Fertility Journal. This session saw high calibre science presented by 10 Undergraduate, Masters and 1st year PhD students that submitted abstracts, with Amy Arnott, the prize winner.

The next part of the SRF Satellite Day began with Postdoctoral Prize Session, again with 5 high calibre talks, with overall prize won by David Skerrett-Byrne, with Alison Maclean receiving the highly commended runner-up award. The Satellite Day ended with a series of prize lectures, including the SRF/SRB Post-Doc exchange lecture given by Ellen Jarred, and SRF/SSR New Investigator lecture given by Shuo Xiao. The Reproduction Journal Prize was won by Thomas Hildebrandt and Suzanne Holtze, and the Emerging Investigator Award, awarded to Claire Stenhouse.

The highest accolade of SRF- the Marshall Medal was awarded to Fuller Bazer, who presented a tour du force on uterine biology and maternal-conceptus recognition of pregnancy. The day ended with our time-honoured tradition of the SRF social, providing a great opportunity to meet with friends and colleagues, and a fun time was had by all!

The main Fertility meeting was a huge success, attended by 877 delegates (not inclusive of speakers), with 15% from overseas countries. 62 invited speakers gave plenary talks and spoke in update sessions. We had a total of 345 abstracts submitted. From these abstracts, 84 were selected for oral presentation and 39 for rapid fire poster sessions. Our exhibitor sponsorship came from 216 exhibitors from 58 companies. In the main meeting the SRF PhD prize session was held, with the prize awarded to Isabel Patterson and highly commended presentation to Ruijuan Xu. The poster prize was also held during the main meeting, with poster prize awarded to Emily Walshe and highly commended to Thomas Hopkins. The Ann Maclaren prize lecture was given by Colin Duncan, giving a fascinating overview of the pathology and potential routes for novel therapeutic interventions in treating patients with PCOS.

From our bursaries we supported 107 people to attend the Fertility meeting. The meeting ran at a profit, with final figures currently being reconciled. Fertility 2026 will be held in Edinburgh, with the theme of ‘shaping our future’.

We look forward to welcoming you there!

Kim Jonas