Division of Bacterial Diseases (DBD) News Bulletin

Awards

2014 CDC & ATSDR Civil Service Honor Awards

The CDC & ATSDR Civil Service Honor Awards celebrate the best of public service by recognizing the outstanding, talented, and dedicated staff of CDC for their contribution to improving public health and making the world a better place. DBD staff were recognized in several award categories at the 2014 ceremony on March 24, 2015.

• The Excellence in Frontline Public Health Service was awarded to a group for the 2014 Unaccompanied Children Response. They won for superlative public health support during the humanitarian response to unaccompanied children crossing the U.S. border. Group members from DBD included: Alison Albert, Bernard Beall, Maureen Diaz, Louise Francois-Watkins, Ryan Gierke, Aaron Harris, Lindsay Kim, Miwako Kobayashi, Lesley McGee, Matt Moore, Kathy Thurman, Sara Tomczyk, Matthew Westercamp, Cyndy Whitney, and Jonas Winchell.
• The Excellence in Program Delivery, International was awarded to the Latin American Pertussis Project Team for exemplary leadership and support of keeping CDC at the forefront of leadership in pandemic preparedness and response, emerging infectious diseases, and global health security. The group from DBD included: Anna Acosta, Elizabeth Briere, Pam Cassiday, Lucia Pawloski, Lucia Tondella, and Brunilis White.
• The Excellence in Laboratory Quality was awarded to the Laboratory Safety Improvement Workgroup for exceptional contributions to accelerating improvements in laboratory safety and quality at CDC. DBD’s Conrad Quinn was part of the recognized group for this award.
• The Excellence in Emergency Response, Ebola was awarded to Deployers to West Africa. Group members from DBD included: Anna Acosta, Lucy Breakwell, Fabien Diomande, Steve Hadler, Rana Hajjeh, Brian Harcourt, Lindsay Kim, Preeta Kutty, Miwako Kobayashi, Lucy McNamara, Sarah Meyer, Ryan Novak, Manisha Patel, Tamara Pilishvili, Heidi Soeters, Jennifer Thomas, Kathleen Thurman, Tej Tiwari, Sara Tomczyk, and Emily Weston.

Donald C. Mackel Memorial Award

RDB’s Louise Francois-Watkins won the Donald C. Mackel Memorial Award for efforts involving response to a Mycoplasma pneumoniae outbreak associated with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (see fall 2014 DBD Bulletin). This award is sponsored by the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Alumni Association and recognizes a current EIS officer for the oral or poster presentation that best exemplifies the effective application of a combined epidemiologic and laboratory approach to an investigation. Sara Tomczyk, in RDB, was also nominated for this award for response efforts to the outbreak of severe respiratory infections among unaccompanied children.

Kaafee Billah Memorial Award

Ruth Link-Gelles and Matt Moore from RDB, along with several coauthors, won the 2014 Kaafee Billah Memorial Award in Economics Research at CDC for their paper, “Cost-Effectiveness of Using 2 vs 3 Primary Doses of 13-Valent Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine” (published in Pediatrics, 2013 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23821695). The Billah Award has been presented by the Health Economics Research Group annually since 2008. The award recognizes outstanding published scientific contributions in economic research at CDC that apply economic methods, theories, and knowledge to analyze a public health problem. The Billah Award is named after former CDC economist, Kaafee Billah, PhD, (1967-2006), and is the first CDC award to honor contributions in the field of economics.

Laboratory Safety Innovation Championship

Darbi Boulay was recently presented with the Laboratory Safety Innovation Championship award. Her winning idea was to create a database of laboratory safety incidents at CDC. Boulay was recognized in a Championship Ceremony, in which she presented her idea to the Office of the Associate Director for Laboratory Science and Safety leadership.

Charles C. Shepard Science Award

Three papers with DBD authors were nominated for the 2014 Award:

• Assessment Category: Bowden KE, Williams MM, Cassiday PK, et al. Molecular epidemiology of the pertussis epidemic in Washington State in 2012. J Clin Microbiol. 2014;52(10):3549–57.
• Data Methods Category: Chen L, Schiffer JM, Dalton S, et al. Comprehensive analysis and selection of anthrax vaccine adsorbed immune correlates of protection in rhesus macaques. Clin Vaccine Immunol. 2014;21(11):1512–20.
• Laboratory Category: Srinvasasan V, Metcalf BJ, Knipe KM, et al. vanG element insertions within a conserved chromosomal site conferring vancomycin resistance to Streptococcus agalactiae and Streptococcus anginosus. MBio. 2014;5(4):e01386–14.

The award is presented to the best manuscript on original research published by a CDC or ATSDR scientist in a reputable, peer-reviewed journal. The purpose of the award is to recognize excellence in scientific achievement by CDC and ATSDR authors of outstanding scientific papers and honor the memory of Charles C. Shepard whose career was marked by the pursuit of scientific excellence.

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