This year the prize has been awarded to Dr Joseph Ward. Dr Ward was nominated the winner for his research paper “Risk factors for PICU admission and death among children and young people hospitalized with COVID-19 and PIMS-TS in England during the first pandemic year”
Dr Ward’s paper focused on the importance in identifying which children and young people (CYP) are most vulnerable to serious infection due to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in order to guide protective interventions.
We spoke with Dr Ward about his research and his tips for aspiring researchers.
What motivated you to get into Paediatric Research?
I was interested paediatric research in order to explore inequalities in child and adolescent health, and understand how population level determinants directly influence my clinical practice in paediatrics.
What does it mean to you to win this award?
I am very grateful to win this award. This project was undertaken as part of a team of collaborators from UCL, NHS England, Imperial College, University of York, PICANET, NCMD and many other organisations – and could not have been completed without them. I hope to continue to collaborate with this team in future projects.
What are your plans for your research career?
I currently work 50% in research and 50% in general paediatrics, and I hope to continue this mix after I CCT. I feel this project demonstrates the potential for using population level administrative hospital data linked with other data sources to answer complex questions about child and adolescent health, and for this to influence public health policy. I plan to undertake similar analyses in my future career.
What is your advice for aspiring researchers?
Remember that all researchers have knock-backs and failures- I think being able to persevere through these challenges is key to an academic career.
The Donald Paterson Award will not be running again for 2024. In our next round of Research Awards it will be our Lorber Award instead. Keep an eye out for more information.