The national SOT Awards celebrate advancements in toxicology across career stages and subfields. Two national awards, the Arnold J. Lehman Award and the Founders Award (for Outstanding Leadership in Toxicology), recognize toxicologists for their significant contributions to safety and risk assessment.
You are encouraged to nominate deserving colleagues for these awards to acknowledge their cutting-edge research by the October 9 deadline. All SOT Awards have their own criteria, so be sure to read each award description closely when making your nomination.
Arnold J. Lehman Award
The Arnold J. Lehman Award is presented to recognize an individual who has made a major contribution to risk assessment and/or the regulation of chemical agents, including pharmaceuticals. The contribution may have resulted from the application of sound scientific principles to regulation and/or from research activities that have significantly influenced the regulatory process.
Founders Award (for Outstanding Leadership in Toxicology)
The SOT Founders Award (for Outstanding Leadership in Toxicology), sponsored by the SOT Endowment Fund, is presented to a Full, Emeritus, or Retired Full SOT member (i.e., not limited to Founding members of SOT) who has demonstrated outstanding leadership in fostering the role of toxicological sciences in safety decision-making through the development and/or application of state-of-the-art approaches that elucidate, with a high degree of confidence, the distinctions for humans between safe and unsafe levels of exposures to chemical and physical agents.
Making a Nomination
Nominations for either award should include both a primary and a secondary letter of nomination from Full members of the Society that provide in layman’s terms an analysis of the nominee’s significant contributions to toxicology and how they apply to the award criteria. The strongest nomination packages include two letters that are distinct from one another to offer more detailed support of the candidate’s qualifications. Nomination packages that include very similar letters of nomination offer less information than those that include recommendations that are varied in content. Letters of nomination should be specific and descriptive while also maintaining a level of concision. The Awards Committee will review only the two letters required to complete the nomination; no additional letters will be considered.
Nominations also should include the nominee’s up-to-date CV. For national SOT Awards, such as the Arnold J. Lehman Award and Founders Award, the Awards Committee requires a standardized length for CVs included in nomination packages. CVs must be a maximum of 10 pages in length and should highlight the candidate’s most significant professional accomplishments as they relate to the criteria for the award. Awards Committee members are required to review only 10 pages of each CV; therefore, submitting a longer CV does not strengthen an award nomination.
For more information on making a nomination, please review the “Awards Review Process and FAQs” web page of the SOT website. Please direct any inquiries to SOT Headquarters.
These are opportunities to honor your colleagues for their outstanding recent accomplishments; you are encouraged to submit your nominations by October 9.
Please note that to ensure a diversity of nominees, there is a two-year grace period for national SOT Awards. Preference will be given to nominees who have not received one of the following SOT awards in the past two years: Achievement, Arnold J. Lehman, Distinguished Toxicology Scholar, Education, Enhancement of Animal Welfare, Founders, Leading Edge in Basic Science, Merit, Public Communications, Toxicologist Mentoring, Translational Impact, Translational/Bridging Travel, and Undergraduate Educator Awards.