HUMA Awardee

Professor Alasdair Geddes

We are delighted to announce that Professor Alasdair Geddes will receive the International Society of Chemotherapy’s (ISC) highest and most prestigious award, the Hamao Umezawa Memorial Award (HUMA) at the ICC – ICAAC in 2015. The award, bestowed by the Microbial Chemistry Research Foundation of Japan in honour of the late Professor Umezawa, is given for outstanding contributions in the field of chemotherapy.

Alasdair Geddes is an Emeritus Professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Birmingham, UK and is the current Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (until September 2015). He is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, is a Fellow of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Pathologists as well as a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health and the Academy of Medical Sciences. He was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for services to infectious diseases.

Alasdair Geddes first presented a paper on an antimicrobial agent at the joint ICAAC/ICC in Washington DC exactly 50 years ago in 1965 and has been involved in antimicrobial research for more than 50 years, both in hospital and in the laboratory. When Alasdair Geddes graduated there were relatively few antimicrobials available but in the 1960’s and 1970’s numerous new antibiotics were introduced and Alastair was involved in the early study of many of them in terms of microbiology, clinical trials and PK/PD studies. His group in Birmingham, UK was a pre-eminent centre both for training in infectious diseases, and also for the evaluation of these new antibiotics. Alasdair carried out many of original clinical studies on the semi-synthetic penicillins including amoxicillin, flucloxacillin and amoxicillin/clavulanic acid and also on new cephalosporins including cefuroxime, cefotaxime and ceftazidime. Cefoxitin and imipenem were also studied by his group.

As a long-term member of the Committee for Safety of Medicines (CSM), the equivalent of the FDA, he was an adviser to the UK government on the registration and safety of antimicrobial agents over a considerable number of years. He was also an early advocate of antibiotic policies and protocols for the appropriate use of antibiotics. He has been a leader in the investigation of new antimicrobial agents and a mentor to many clinical scientists who have progressed to form research groups of their own.

The HUMA will be presented to Professor Alasdair Geddes during the ICAAC / ICC 2015 in San Diego on Sunday 20th September at 13.30 where he will also deliver his lecture ICAAC / ICC 1965 to 2015 - 50 years of Antibiotic Development.