Louis Schmidt Award

The Louis Schmidt Committee of the BioCommunications Association is pleased to announce that Simon Brown is the 2025 Louis Schmidt Laureate.

Simon’s career in clinical photography started in 1977 and, while at the Charing Cross & Westminster Medical School, he gained numerous awards for clinical photography and was awarded Fellowship of the Institute of Medical Illustrators (IMI) in 1985.

In 1986, Simon moved to the world-famous Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, firstly as Deputy Director, then as Director of Medical Illustration. It was during his time at Great Ormond Street that the first generation of digital cameras appeared and Simon and his staff embraced the new technology with enthusiasm. He published seminal papers on the use of digital imaging in clinical photography in what was then the Journal of Audiovisual Media in Medicine.

At University College London (UCL), he was made Director of Media Resources between 1996 and 2006, then he left to pursue a freelance career and moved to the West Midlands to enable his daughter’s continued specialist schooling.

During his career, Simon has been Chair of the Royal Photographic Society’s Medical Group, Chair of the Institute of Medical Illustrators (IMI) in 1993-94 and is one of only two medical photographers to receive the prestigious Combined Royal Colleges Medal in 2005, the highest award in Medical Photography for “an outstanding contribution to Imaging in the Advancement of Medicine and Surgery”. He also received IMI’s Norman K Harrison Award in 2002 and their Honorary Fellowship in 2019.

Simon co-authored and produced all the photographs and illustrations for Wolfe’s “Colour Atlas of AIDS” in 1986 and has published fifteen peer-reviewed papers and presented numerous times at meetings and conferences in the USA, the UK and Scandinavia. Most recently, he has co-edited and part-authored the new textbook, “Clinical Photography – theory and practice”, published in 2024 by Routledge.

Simon has always been passionate about education and training in clinical photography, encouraging students and trainees to achieve the highest standards. Since 2006 he has been the professional co-ordinator for the Graduate and Postgraduate courses at the University of Staffordshire and has seen over 500 students through the courses in the past eighteen years.