Honours and awards
The BDA's Honours and Awards are designed to acknowledge the unsung heroes of our profession; those who uphold and improve the standards of dentistry.
Each year, our Honours and Awards celebrate those who have made a significant contribution to the BDA and/or the dental profession.
Who can be nominated?
Many nominations are made through our branches and sections, committees, and other networks, but we encourage nominations from anyone who feels their nominee meets our criteria. Self-nominations are not permitted.
We particularly encourage nominations from academic, community, hospital, or armed forces dentists and we want to celebrate the diversity of our profession.
The Honours and Awards are aimed at those who have provided outstanding merit and service to their profession. They are intended to recognise outstanding contributions from individuals of all ages, backgrounds and at any stage of their careers.
How do I nominate someone?
The deadline is 30 May 2025.
Our nomination form is designed to help you show how your nominee has met the Awards criteria. It is important to try and complete as many sections as possible. Please use the links below to the sample form for each honour and award to give some guidance.
Awards criteria
There are four types of Honours (President, Honorary Membership, Life Membership, Fellowship Medal) and four Awards (John Tomes Award, Roll of Distinction, Award for Excellence, Joy Harrild Award), and each aims to honour service provided from different areas of dentistry - please ensure you look at the Awards' criteria before nominating.
Nominations for honours and awards will be hugely strengthened if they receive support from the relevant, branch, section, or group, particularly where the nomination is based on the members’ contribution to the branch, section, or group. The BDA’s country councils and committees can also support nominations. We recognise that in some cases – for example, where the nomination is based on the members’ scientific achievement – it is not necessary for the nomination to be supported by a BDA body. However, we do not accept self-nominations or nominations made by family members or friends.
Unless the honour or award is specifically open to individuals who are not BDA members or eligible for BDA membership, such as Honorary Membership and the Roll of Distinction, nominees are expected to be BDA members or to have had long-standing membership that has been given up for reasons such as retirement.
It is important that nominations provide as much detail as possible about the nominee to help the Honours and Awards Committee make a fair decision. Nominators should not assume that the Committee will have existing knowledge of the nominee and so should provide comprehensive information about their career, contributions, and achievements. Where the nominee is not aware of the nomination, we appreciate this can be difficult and so it is best to consult with a range of colleagues to put together as much information as you can.
BDA staff are happy to provide advice on nominations and will request further information where nominations are not detailed enough, but nominators should not expect that staff will undertake additional research. The Committee will only be presented with the information provided by the nominator and that which is available from the BDA’s membership database (e.g. Length of membership, previous honours or awards received).
Our Membership Team are happy to support nominators with relevant membership information about nominees, please email [email protected] or call 020 7563 4550.
The Chair of the Honours and Awards Committee, Roz McMullan [email protected], is also willing to advise on any proposed nomination.
Nominators are asked to fill in the nomination form electronically. Handwritten forms are not accepted.
Signatures on nomination forms do not have to be handwritten; a typed ‘e-signature’ is perfectly acceptable. Scanning in nomination forms that have been hand-signed makes them difficult to process and this should be avoided where possible.
Any questions?
Please contact our Honours and Awards secretariat, Alison Magee: [email protected].
BDJ Obituary
If there is somebody you would like to write an obituary for please scroll to the end of this BDJ guidance for authors page for more details.
Obituaries must be no more than 400 words unless it is for a past national BDA president when a longer obituary (800 words) is acceptable.
If you would like us to look for biographical information that might feed into your more personal memories please contact the library at [email protected].