Dr Leo Martinez, as part of winning the inaugural Stephen Lawn TB-HIV Research Leadership Prize, has been profiled in The Lancet this week – highlighting his outstanding research on reducing the childhood tuberculosis burden.
Dr Leo Martinez, as part of winning the inaugural The Stephen Lawn TB-HIV Research Leadership Prize, has been profiled in The Lancet this week – highlighting his outstanding research on reducing the childhood tuberculosis (TB) burden.
Dr Martinez is a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. He received his PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Georgia in 2017 and his Masters of Public Health from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in 2012.
His research, conducted primarily in Uganda, has a focus on childhood TB and covers a range of interests including the epidemiology of TB with a focus on the location of occurrence for person-to-person transmission; and also applying meaningful, effective interventions and policy recommendations to mitigate the spread of TB in economically impoverished settings.
Speaking in The Lancet, Jason Andrews, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) at Stanford University said: “Leo has demonstrated how to efficiently identify TB cases among children through targeted household contact investigations in settings with limited resources.”
The Stephen Lawn Memorial Fund was established in 2016 through a global partnership between the TB Centre of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (UK), the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and The Union, and is also supported by The Lancet. The Research Leadership Prize, as part of the Fund, is for innovative research on TB and HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, and acknowledges young researchers conducting promising work focused on reducing the disease burden of TB and HIV/AIDS in Africa.
Nominations for the 2018 award, and all other Union 2018 awards, are open until Friday 30 March.