Australia’s most prestigious mid-career medical research Fellowships has embedded gender equity in its awards –  starting this year the national Sylvia and Charles Viertel Charitable Foundation Senior Medical Research Fellowships are being awarded to one male and one female outstanding mid-career scientist, making their mark with medical research that shows great promise for the future.

The winners of the 2016 Sylvia and Charles Viertel Charitable Foundation Senior Medical Research Fellowships are Dr Marie-Liesse Asselin-Labat - Group Leader, Stem Cells and Cancer division, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research; and Dr Thomas Gebhardt - Senior Research Fellow, Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection & Immunity (The University of Melbourne).

The Chairman of the Viertel Foundation’s Medical Advisory Board, Professor Peter Leedman said the Foundation’s Medical Advisory Board had made the recommendation to the Trustees for Fellowships to be awarded to one man and one woman each year in recognition that gender equity in science was a significant issue and that in recent years the Awards had seen a growing prevalence of male recipients.

Four years ago a little over half of all recipients of this Fellowship were women scientists, but over the past four years this had slipped to a little over a third. 

Read the full Media Release here.