Sébastien Gagneux receives Gardner Middlebrook Award 2019

The Gardner Middlebrook Lifetime Achievement Award honours outstanding contributions in the study, diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis. Sponsored by Becton Dickinson Diagnostic Systems, this award has been presented to a select group of microbiologists and immunologists in the area of mycobacterial diseases since 1996. The award is named after Gardner Middlebrook (1915-1986), a US physician, professor and worldwide authority on tuberculosis who was known for his commitment to biomedical research.

Sébastien Gagneux received the 2019 Middlebrook Award in recognition for his high-impact work on the evolution and ecology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Gagneux's work combines population genomics, molecular epidemiology and experimental approaches to determine the effect of bacterial variation on the host-pathogen interaction and the spread of antibiotic resistance.

Gagneux received his PhD from the University of Basel in 2001 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, USA before serving as a Programme Leader at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London, UK. He now heads the Department of Medical Parasitology and Infection Biology at Swiss TPH and is an Associate Professor of Infection Biology at the University of Basel.