The 2026 award for Best Dissertation submitted in 2025 was awarded to Jeremiah Earl Bell from Carleton University.  Bell’s thesis, “Communicating through Uncertainty: The Role of Professional Communication in Canadian Paramedic Decision-Making Across Training and Workplace Contexts,” integrates activity theory, situated learning, and distributed cognition to provide a rich exploration of professional communication in paramedic training and practice. The study shows that communication is “not merely a competency,” but “the medium through which all professional practice occurs” (Bell, 2025, p. 239) and has important implications for teachers, practitioners and administrators. Bell’s rich multi-modal analysis of the gap between the communicative strategies that constitute training and the ones used in professional paramedic practice is relevant not only for healthcare but more broadly for professions that involve collaboration, deliberation and the management of uncertainty. Bell’s research has the potential to enhance how writing and communication are taught and to impact curricular design and thus constitutes an important contribution to the field of writing and discourse studies.