The Student Voice Prize
What is The Student Voice Prize?
The Student Voice Prize is an annual, international essay competition that raises the profile of rare disease within the medical field, particularly with medical students, nurses and scientists who may have never come across rare diseases in their training.
Beacon and Medics4RareDiseases host the competition together and the winner gets published in The Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases!
The competition is now closed for entries for 2022.
Why rare diseases?
Rare diseases affect approximately 350 million people worldwide and still they’re some of the most difficult conditions to diagnose. Despite the large number of people affected around the world, little time is dedicated to rare diseases in medical school. It is why The Student Voice Prize challenges the doctors, nurses and scientists of tomorrow to think about rare disease today. After all, with a lifetime risk of 1 in 17 in the UK, it’s not rare to come across them!
What can you win?
How did we know that you’d scroll to this section first! Ready to be amazed?
The 2022 Prizes include:
📰 Publication in one of the world’s most widely read scientific journals
🗣️ Speaking engagements
🧳 Free trip to scientific conferences with all travel expenses paid
🙋 Become an advocate for rare disease
💰 Money
You can also gain:
📜 The opportunity to be recognised on the official shortlist for the Student Voice Prize 2022
📜 The opportunity to be published on the Beacon or M4RD blog
📜 Opportunities to network and work with patient groups and members of the rare community

Our 2022 supporters
Beacon relies on the generous contribution of sponsors to continue working on the Student Voice Prize year after year. We would like to say a big thank you to our sponsors for 2022:


M4RD would like to thank all sponsors and donors for their generous support. Rather than targeting resources on one specific disease they understand that one part of achieving earlier diagnoses is by breaking down the stigma of rare diseases in healthcare. The work of M4RD will benefit all rare diseases.
Copyright © Beacon 2022
Registered Charity no: 1149646 | Company Registration: 8174973
Copyright © Medics4RareDiseases Ltd 2022
Registered Charity no: 1183996 | Company Registration: 11119884