Awardees in 2012


Congratulations to the recipients of the TAE Excellence Training Awards in 2012.

  • Emma Jane Hutley*, Surrey, United Kingdom
  • Meera Chand*, London, United Kingdom
  • Koen Vanden Driessche, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
  • Chrysanthi Skevaki, Athens, Greece
  • Lorenzo Guglielmetti, Verona, Italy

*Joint Award

Meera Chand and Emma Hutley* are specialist registrars in Clinical Microbiology and Virology, employed by the UK Health Protection Agency and the Ministry of Defence respectively. During their clinical training at University College London Hospitals, they have worked, both separately and together, on a variety of local and national projects, including preparation for the Olympics and implementation of diagnostics in austere environments. They are continually exploring the use of Microbiology beyond the hospital environment. They have worked across Infection and Public Health specialties and have come to understand the need to share training and information between disciplines. To this end they have set up a collaborative online training resource, LearnInfection, for infection and public health practitioners of all kinds. This freely available resource is now widely used in the UK and has increasing international users.

Koen Vanden Driessche, MD, (1979) studied medicine in Leuven, Belgium and Tropical Medicine and International Health in Antwerp, Belgium. From 2005 to 2006 he worked with Professor Annelies Van Rie in a CDC funded operational research project of the University of North Carolina. His contributions led to the scaling up of integrated HIV care for TB patients in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. Subsequently, he combined his Paediatric training in Nijmegen, The Netherlands with teaching Paediatrics at the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine, Belgium. Currently his research activities are focused on preventing the transmission of tuberculosis and other respiratory tract infections, supervised by Professors Ronald de Groot, Ben Marais and Mark Cotton. In May 2012 he relocated to Vancouver, Canada, to start a Paediatric Infectious Diseases fellowship at BC Children’s Hospital.

Lorenzo Guglielmetti graduated from the University of Verona, Italy, in 2007. During his medical studies he practised for two months as a volunteer in Mombasa, Kenya. He began his training in Infectious Diseases in 2008 in Verona, where, following his main interest, he acquired specific clinical experience in the field of tuberculosis. He deepened his knowledge in Micobacteriology by attending advanced courses on leprosy and tuberculosis, held at the Italian National Reference Centre. He established a profitable collaboration with Immunology and Microbiology Departments on performing interferon-gamma release assays and the alterations in lymphocyte subpopulations in patients affected by active tuberculosis. In 2011 he worked at the Hospital of Kiremba, Burundi, treating mainly tropical diseases and collecting new epidemiological data concerning the extent of tuberculosis in the country after the civil war. Dr. Guglielmetti is currently completing his final year of training and planning a period of Microbiology Observership in Paris.

Chrysanthi Skevaki, following graduation from Medical School, worked as a Research Fellow in the Infectious Diseases Unit of the Second Department of Paediatrics at the University of Athens and gained interest in the field of respiratory tract infections. Later on, she completed her PhD thesis while at the Research Laboratories of the same Department and continued as a Post-doctoral Researcher there. She is currently a trainee at the Microbiology Department of the "Aghia Sofia" Children's Hospital and is simultaneously involved in the laboratory supervision and training of students. Her main area of scientific interest is the association between respiratory infections and allergic manifestations and she has been privileged to receive a number of grants/fellowship awards for research in this field. In recent years, she has devoted much of her energy to serve in positions that protect and facilitate the role of junior researchers and clinicians in the overall evolution of scientific knowledge.