(WBP), and Head of Stakeholder Engagement at Biogen, has been awarded the World Sustainability Award 2020 for outstanding contributions to sex and gender-oriented precision medicine. The achievement recognizes her pioneering work in exploring how sex and gender differences impact mental and brain diseases and can lead to a more inclusive and sustainable healthcare system.
Dr. Santuccione Chadha shares the World Sustainability Award 2020 with distinguished Professor Dr. Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. The award ceremony took place on Sept. 15 during the 8th World Sustainability Forum organized by MDPI in Switzerland, which will be a virtual event this year.
[See Dr. Santuccione Chadha’s acceptance speech here.]
“We are honored to receive the World Sustainability Award, a great achievement for our mission to include sex and gender differences in precision medicine, and a celebration of our hard-working team that has been operating mainly pro bono,” said Dr. Santuccione Chadha.
“Since 2016, we have been leading efforts to study the influence of sex and gender differences in mental and brain diseases with novel technology developments to foster diversity in precision medicine. Artificial intelligence is a great source of insights for scientific research and precision medicine, but it relies on large dataset bias, mainly European, and based on white men. We want to break the biases in precision medicine and to promote differentiated data to make clinical trials, drugs development, and health outcomes not discriminatory.”
“This award validates our innovative approach to make both sex and gender critical variables in future research, to improve health outcomes and reduce health cost in the long-term, integrating this approach into novel technologies such as apps and AI-powered algorithms” added Dr. Annemarie Schumacher-Dimech, co-founder and President of WBP.
“We are thrilled to recognize the work of Dr. Santuccione Chadha and Dr. Mann, and to add their names to the list of trailblazer awardees who champion sustainable development that began in 2017 with Jeffrey Sachs and Sonia Ehrlich Sachs, and was followed by Dr. Mathis Wackernagel and Dr. Zhifu Mi in 2018,” said Prof. Dr. Ed Constable, Former Vice President for Research of the University of Basel and co-chair of the Award Selection Committee.
“Over the years, we have received nominations for the World Sustainability Award of ever-increasing diversity in medicine, and we look forward to seeing the impact of the WBP on making health systems more sustainable – a key issue that is almost never talked about.”
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About the Word Sustainability Award
The World Sustainability Award was funded in 2017 by the MDPI Sustainability Foundation to encourage new initiatives and developments in sustainability and is conferred to individual researchers or research teams who have made an outstanding academic or societal contribution to sustainability in general, or to a sustainability-relevant issue in particular.
The first edition was awarded to Professor Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, renowned economics professor, global leader in sustainable development, and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He shared the award with Dr. Sonia Ehrlich Sachs, paediatrician, public health specialist and researcher scholar at the Earth Institute, Columbia University.
The second edition of the World Sustinability Award was awarded to Dr. Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network. The organization marks “Earth Overshoot Day”, the date each year when humanity has used more from nature than the earth can renew in the entire year.
He shared the award with Dr. Zhifu Mi, lecturer at University College London and co-developer of the China Emission Accounts and Datasets which provides the most up-to-date, comparable, verifiable, and free emission-accounting inventories of China.
To find out more, visit https://wsforum.org/instructions#awardees
About Dr. Antonella Santuccione Chadha
Dr. Antonella Santuccione Chadha, M.D., is a medical doctor with extensive experience in clinical pathology, neuroscience, and psychiatric disorders. She is the co-founder and CEO of the Women’s Brain Project (WBP). Currently, Dr. Santuccione Chadha works at Biogen as Head of Stakeholder Engagement. Previously, she worked with Swissmedic, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the EU Commission for Health and Food Safety, the World Health Organization, Roche, and several Alzheimer’s Disease organizations. Dr. Santuccione Chadha is keenly interested in sex and gender differences as a gateway to precision medicine. In 2019, she was nominated as Woman of the Year in Switzerland by the magazine Women in Business.
About the Women Brain’s Project
The Women’s Brain Project (WBP) is an international non-profit organization based in Switzerland. Composed largely of scientists, WBP advocates for and conducts research on sex and gender sensitive precision medicine, from basic science to novel technologies. The organization aims to get a better understanding how men and women’s brains are similar and different, and to stimulate a global social and political discussion on gender and sex determinants of brain and mental health as a gateway to precision medicine. This goes hand in hand with breaking the stigma around brain and mental health and raising awareness around these topics. The WBP team also aims to contribute to the fulfilment of Sustainable Development Goals 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing) and 5 (Gender Equality), among others.
The WBP team constantly delivers peer-reviewed scientific papers, organizing and taking part in scientific and policy events, and offering workshops on mental health to a non-scientific public. Its flagship event is the International Forum on Women’s Brain and Mental Health, which takes place every year in Switzerland.
To find out more, visit http://www.womensbrainproject.com/
Media contact: If you are interested in speaking with Dr. Antonella Santuccione Chadha, please contact Kontx PR Agency: Bettina Gebhardt, bettina.gebhardt[at]kontx.ch
