Each year The Union hosts an awards ceremony as part of the Inaugural Session of the World Conference on Lung Health.
From left to right: Dr Richard E Chaisson, Dr Grant Theron, Dr Julian Villalba, Dr Maarten van Cleeff, Dr Chakaya Muhwa
Each year The Union hosts an awards ceremony as part of the Inaugural Session of the World Conference on Lung Health. This year five awards were presented, all honouring contributions to tuberculosis and lung health:
Princess Chichibu Global Memorial TB Award: Dr Chakaya Muhwa (Kenya)
Dr Chakaya Muhwa is a TB and chest diseases clinical expert, based at the Center for Respiratory Diseases Research, Kenya Medical Research Institute. He also works as the Technical Director at the Kenya Association for The Prevention of Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases (KAPTLD).
The Karel Styblo Public Health Prize: Dr Maarten van Cleeff (The Netherlands)
Dr Maarten van Cleeff is the TB CARE I Project Director at KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation. He started his international career in Tanzania, working with the National TB and Leprosy Programme from 1981 to 1990. Under the guidance of Dr Karel Styblo, he and his colleagues played a key role in the implementation of a countrywide TB programme, using short-course chemotherapy. This programmatic field model became the basis for the global TB control model that has been known since the 1990s as the DOTS strategy. He continues to contribute to the international policy agenda in different forums.
The Union Scientific Prize: Dr Richard E Chaisson (USA)
Dr Richard E Chaisson is the founder and Director of the Center for Tuberculosis Research; Principal Investigator of the Center for AIDS Research; and Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology and International Health at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland (USA). He has worked in TB and HIV research for more than 30 years and has been active in both clinical care and the training of new clinicians and researchers. He has published more than 450 scientific papers and book chapters.
The Union Young Investigator Prize: Dr Grant Theron (South Africa)
Dr Grant Theron is a Senior Scientist in the Lung Infection and Immunity Unit in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His research has focused on the design and field evaluation of diagnostics for tuberculosis and drug resistance. He recently led a landmark, four-country randomized controlled trial of the GeneXpert test for TB, which was the first to measure the clinical impact of the test and demonstrated it to be feasible at the point-of-care when performed by a minimally trained healthcare worker.
The Union/Otsuka Young Innovator in TB Research Award: Dr Julian Villalba (Venezuela)
While working with the Warao community in Venezuela’s rural Orinoco Delta region, Dr Villalba became passionately interested in childhood TB. His subsequent research focused on analysing the diagnostic systems for childhood TB, leading him to conclude that “rule out” systems would be more effective than “rule in” to identify Warao children who would benefit from treatment. He also studied the feasibility of applying this approach to high-burden areas of Venezuela and described the first published transcriptome signature to distinguish active from latent childhood TB, among other research projects.