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Zulfiqar A. Bhutta receives John Dirks Canada Gairdner 2022 Global Health Award

 
Zulfiqar A. Bhutta, a long-time IDRC grantee, has been awarded the John Dirks Canada Gairdner 2022 Global Health Award “for the development and evaluation of evidence-based interventions in child and maternal health for marginalized populations, focusing on outcomes for the ‘first thousand days’ of life.”
A photo of Zulfiqar A. Bhutta
Zulfiqar A. Bhutta, winner of the John Dirks Canada Gairdner 2022 Global Health Award.

On receiving the award, Bhutta noted, “I am deeply grateful for this recognition especially as much of the work of my group has been in orphan areas, such as women and children’s health in poor, marginalized populations or conflict zones, areas that receive little policy attention despite the clustering of a large proportion of global misery and ill health therein. By shining some light from science- and evidence-based research on such challenges and issues, we have tried to address some of the global inequities we face.” 

He also stated that “I am especially grateful to IDRC for being such a wonderful thought partner over the years, unafraid to step up and support scholarship in neglected areas — be those evidence of what works in fragile settings, remote and rural populations or among rarely studied age groups such as school-age children and young adolescents.” Bhutta recently led the following IDRC projects:  

As the Founding Director of the Centre of Excellence in Women and Child Health and the Institute of Global Health and Development at the Aga Khan University, Bhutta also holds the Inaugural Robert Harding Chair in Global Child Health and serves as the Co-Director of SickKids’ Centre for Global Child Health in Toronto. He leads large research groups in Canada, Pakistan and East Africa that are focused on scaling up evidence-based interventions in community settings, in addition to the implementation of Reproductive Maternal Newborn Child Adolescent Health Plus Nutrition interventions in humanitarian contexts. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the 2021 Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluations’ Roux Prize recipient for significant contributions to women and child health research. 

Established in 1957, the Gairdner Foundation acknowledges the work of scientists whose discoveries have had a major impact on scientific progress and on human health. Since the first awards were granted in 1959, 402 scientists from more than 40 countries have received a Canada Gairdner Award and 96 of those have also received the Nobel Prize.