People in the news - June 2018

U.S. Global Malaria Coordinator named

Dr. Kenneth Staley was tapped as U.S. Global Malaria Coordinator to oversee the President’s Malaria Initiative, which is led by USAID and implemented with HHS and CDC. Staley has served with the State Department and White House Homeland Security Council, and recently was a consultant working on crisis responses to Ebola and MERS.

New leadership for Indian research

Dr. Balram Bhargava is the new Secretary of the Department of Health Research in India and Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research. Previously, he was professor of cardiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. He is known for biomedical innovation, public health, medical research, education and training.

Barry receives top award for female physician

Fogarty grantee Dr. Michele Barry, senior associate dean of global health at Stanford University, was awarded the American Medical Women’s Association 2018 Elizabeth Blackwell Medal. Created in tribute to the first woman to receive a medical degree from a U.S. institution, the award recognizes contributions to the cause of women in medicine.

Howard University bestows honorary degree on Pinn

Howard University presented an honorary Doctor of Science degree to Dr. Vivian Pinn, senior scientist emerita at Fogarty. Pinn was a professor and chair of the department of pathology at Howard’s College of Medicine before coming to NIH, where she was the first full-time director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health.

Murphy inducted into engineering elite

Dr. Robert Murphy, a Fogarty grantee, was inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows. A professor at Northwestern University and director of its Center for Global Health, Murphy was recognized for outstanding service in developing centers of excellence in infectious disease and biomedical engineering in sub-Saharan Africa.

Photo by Emilio Williams

Global Burden of Disease founders honored

For “groundbreaking work in conceptualizing and quantifying the Global Burden of Disease (GBD),” Dr. Christopher Murray (pictured top left) and Dr. Alan Lopez (pictured bottom left) will receive the 2018 John Dirks Canada Gairdner Global Health Award. Murray is director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and Lopez is a Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne.

Under their leadership, the GBD enterprise has grown to include a network of 3,191 collaborators in 140 countries and three territories, contributing to what has been recognized as the world’s largest publishing collaboration in science. The study’s latest edition covers 333 diseases and 84 risk factors.