Professor Christine Stabell Benn has been awarded the George Macdonald Medal

Professor at Department of Clinical Research (OPEN), Christine Stabell Benn has been awarded the George Macdonald Medal for outstanding research leading to improvement of health in the tropics. The medal is awarded every third year.

Previous medal winners include Donald A. Henderson, who led the international efforts to eradicate smallpox, and Tore Godal, one of the most influential health physicians of all time.

Has changed the understanding of vaccines effects

Christine Stabell Benn's research has helped to document that vaccines and vitamins affect the immune system in a much more general way than previously thought; both types of intervention have what has now been coined “non-specific effects”.

Christine Stabell Benn has been a leader in showing how the different health interventions can interact with each other, often in a manner that leads to different effects in the two biological sexes. This means, among other things, that the sequence and combination of health interventions is more important than previously thought.

- I am very happy and honoured to be awarded the George Macdonald Medal. There are many assumptions about which interventions work in low- and middle-income countries and many assumptions about how the interventions work. My group has made it a top priority to challenge these assumptions in global health, by assessing the overall health effects of interventions in real life settings. The medal is a great encouragement to continue this line of curiosity-driven research, says Christine Stabell Benn.