Faculty of Medicine celebrates its successes at 2006 Awards Ceremony

Event sees the award of three prestigious Faculty of Medicine Fellowships, ten NHS Teaching Excellence Awards and 16 Long Service Recognition Awards - News

By Laura Gallagher
Friday 27 October 2006

Academics, clinicians and administrators from the Faculty of Medicine and associated NHS Trusts came together last night to celebrate the Faculty's successes at its annual Awards Ceremony.

The event, now in its sixth year, saw the award of three prestigious Faculty of Medicine Fellowships, ten NHS Teaching Excellence Awards and 16 Long Service Recognition Awards.

It included a thought-provoking lecture on the need to address global inequalities, entitled 'Global health: diagnosis, prognosis and management,' by distinguished guest speaker Professor Solomon Benatar. Professor Benatar is currently Professor of Medicine at the University of Cape Town and the founding Director of its Bioethics Centre. He also collected his 2005 Fellowship of the Faculty of Medicine at the event.

Opening the ceremony, Professor Stephen Smith , Principal of the Faculty of Medicine, summarised the Faculty's many achievements in research and teaching over the past year.

Professor Smith said: "2006 has been an exciting year for us. We have just been ranked by the Times Higher as fourth in the world for biomedicine and that's a major achievement of which we can be justly proud. It's only ten years since the medical school formed – to have achieved so much in ten years is quite an extraordinary feat.

"We have had numerous successes in attracting major initiatives such as the new CRUK and DoH funded Experimental Cancer Research Centre, and further collaborations with the NHS and other academic partners to establish major new centres for research into diabetes, healthcare technology and genetics," he added.

Professor Smith also congratulated the Faculty on its outstanding teaching record and on rising to third position in the Guardian newspaper's league table for undergraduate medicine courses. "It is the Faculty's goal to deliver a course which will ensure that each and every one of our students is stimulated during their time here, to emerge with the knowledge and understanding that will ensure they embark on their careers with the skills to become not just card-carrying members of the field of medicine, but the leaders in their fields," he said.

Professor Smith presented Faculty of Medicine Fellowships to three individuals chosen for their outstanding distinction in their fields. Professor Nirmal Ganguly, Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research, travelled from India to attend the ceremony. He was joined by Professor Patrick Vallance, Senior Vice President of Drug Discovery at GlaxoSmithKline. The third new Fellow, Professor John Savill, Vice Principal and Head of the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, was unable to attend the event. He will receive his Fellowship at a subsequent ceremony.

Miss Jenny Higham , the new Head of Undergraduate Medicine, presented NHS Teaching Excellence Awards to nominated NHS staff (named below) in recognition of their contributions to undergraduate medical education at the College. Over 800 NHS staff play a part in the delivery of the undergraduate course and Imperial considers their contribution to be immensely valuable.

Miss Higham quoted William A Ward to explain what was so special about the teachers receiving their awards. "'The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires,'" she said.

The Faculty also awarded 16 Long Service Recognition Awards, which recognise the input of its most long-serving members to the academic life of the College's medical community.

Presenting these awards, Professor Chris Kennard , Deputy Principal of the Faculty of Medicine, said: "As the Faculty goes from strength to strength, we become ever more appreciative of the expertise which our most long-serving members of staff offer, through their individual scientific and professional expertise, and by virtue of their understanding, and the guidance they offer the rest of us, in addressing the stresses, complexities and rewards of working within the medical academic environment."

Closing the ceremony, the Deputy Rector, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz , congratulated Professor Smith and the Faculty as a whole on a remarkable year and a remarkable ten years. He thanked the recipients of the day’s awards on behalf of the College.

The ceremony was followed by a drinks reception in a marquee on the Queen's Lawn, where colleagues of those who had received awards were able to offer their congratulations in person.

-ends-

2006 Awards

NHS Teaching Excellence Awards

Dr Jonathan Cooper, Ashford & St Peter's Hospital NHS Trust
Dr Michael Pelly, Chelsea & Westminster Healthcare NHS Trust
Dr Donald MacDonald, Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust
Dr Robert N Davidson, North West London Hospitals NHS Trust
Mr Robin Touquet, St Mary's NHS Trust
Mr Christoper J Kelley, Hillingdon Hospital NHS Trust
Ms Elizabeth Owen, West Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust
Dr Derek Williams, Ealing Hospital NHS Trust
Dr Mark Downs, The Surgery, Munster Road
Dr Claudia Wald, CNWL Mental Health NHS Trust

Long Service Recognition Awards

Dr Mohammed Aslam, S.O.R.A
Professor Jacqueline de Belleroche, Neurosciences and Mental Health
Mr Yash Pal Bhasin, Investigative Science
Mr Terry Bull, Neurosciences and Ment al Health
Mr Gary Childs, Medicine
Professor Sian Harding, National Heart and Lung Institute
Mrs Sylvia Hedges, Investigative Science
Miss Sally Hockley, National Heart and Lung Institute
Mrs Lorraine Jones, S.O.R.A
Mr Richard Mattin, National Heart and Lung Institute
Professor Philip A Poole-Wilson, National Heart and Lung Institute
Professor Michael Reed, Medicine
Profess or Peter Sugden, Na tio nal Heart and Lung Institute
Professor Teresa Tetley, National Heart and Lung Institute
Dr Susan Paterson, Investigative Science
Professor Patrick Venables, Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology

Faculty Fellowship Awards

Professor Nirmal Ganguly

Professor Ganguly undertook his MBBS in Kolkata and MD in microbiology at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research. He began his professional life as a teacher but went on to progress rapidly through academic ranks, first as Assistant Professor of Bacteriology, then Associate Professor of Parisitology and Professor of Immunology at GB Pant hospital, and became Professor of Experimental Medicine and later Professor of Biotechnology at the Postgraduate Institute.

In 1998, Professor Ganguly took up his present post as Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research and he is credited as being 'the single largest factor in lifting the level of scientific study' undertaken within the council's institutes to its current level of excellence in recent years.

Besides scientific and clinical research, Professor Gangluy has focused attention of the ICMR on some important socio-economic issues like gender related problems, access to major technology and translational research so that the technological progress reaches the people who need it. An example of the ICMR's impact on healthcare in the region is in Polio. The council now houses the largest global reference lab for the disease and has, for the first time, been able to introduce polio virus surveillance in India, informing immunisation practice and policy-making across the region.

Professor Patrick Vallance

Professor Vallance undertook his scientific and medical degrees at the University of London. He was appointed in 1987 as Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacology in the department of Pharmacology and Clinical Pharmacology at St George's Hospital Medic al School, moving on to become Wellcome Trust Clinical Fellow, and finally Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant Physician. He moved to take up post as Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at University College London in 1995, and became Head of the Division of Medicine.

His own research has focused on the role of the vascular endothelium in the regulation of vascular tone and blood cell-vessel wall interactions. The breadth of this research encompasses structural biology and medicinal chemistry, right through to clinical studies of basic mechanisms of vascular control in humans and trials of novel therapeutic agents. He has described the philosophy behind his work as emanating from the principle 'that drug mechanisms and effects can be used to study physiology and disease and that it should be possible to use the whole range of techniques from molecular to clinical to address specific questions.'

In his position as Head of the Division of Medicine at UCL, Professor Vallance led a department of international renown. He has also maintained contact with patients during his career, practicing in general internal medicine, cardiovascular medicine, and clinical pharmacology.

Professor Vallance took up the post of Senior Vice President, Drug Discovery, at GlaxoSmithKline in May 2006.

Professor Soloman Benatar

Professor Benatar is currently Professor of Medicine and founding Director of the University of Cape Town's Bioethics Centre. He was Professor of Medicine, Chairman of the University of Cape Town's Department of Internal Medicine and Chief Physician at Groote Schuur Hospital from 1980-1999. Additional appointments in recent years have included visiting professorships at University College London Medical School, University of Toronto, Chairman of the National Research Ethics Committee in South Africa, Director of the NIH (Fogarty International Center) funded program for capacity building in International Research Ethics in southern Africa – IRENSA and Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of CAPRISA (Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa).

After graduating from UCT in 1965 and spending time in family practice he trained first in Anaesthetics and then in Internal Medicine in Cape Town and in London, where he worked closely with a number of Imperial staff. His academic interests have ranged from respiratory medicine, academic freedom, medical ethics and the humanities in medicine, to human rights, health care systems, health economics and global health - on which topics he has published over 230 journal articles and book chapters.

He is a corresponding member of the US National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Human Rights, and a member of several multidisciplinary, international research groups. During the 1994/95 academic year he was a Fellow in the Program in Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University and Visiting Professor at Harvard Medical School. He has recently been an advisor to UNAIDS (Geneva) the HIV Trials Prevention Network (USA) and Medecins Sans Frontieres, and was President of the International Association of Bioethics from 2001-2003.