Dhaka December 11,2016. It is our pleasure to share with you the exciting news that Dr. Samir K Saha of Bangladesh has been selected a member of the American Society of Microbiology (ASM) Award for Research in Clinical Microbiology, 2017. This is the first time that the awardee has been selected from a nation outside the developed world. The ceremony for this lifetime achievement award will be held during the ASM Microbe meeting, June 01-05, 2017, in New Orleans, USA. Every year, since 1978, the award honors a distinguished clinical microbiologist for outstanding research accomplishments leading to or forming the foundation for an important applications in clinical microbiology. This is a remarkable achievement of Dr. Samir and his team.
Dr. Saha completed his BSc and MSc from the University of Dhaka in 1980 and 1983, respectively. He received Ph.D. in microbiology from the Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras, India in 1989. He is currently the head of Microbiology Department at the Dhaka Shishu (Children) Hospital (DSH), Bangladesh and the Executive Director of the Child Health Research Foundation (CHRF), Bangladesh.
Dr. Saha started his journey from the “corridor” of the pathology department of DSH in 1983. With his devotion to science and motto of breaking the vicious cycle of “limited resources and evidence-gap”, he started building a team. He has established a network of over 100 members working in multiple clinical microbiology laboratories with nested research programs. He established a community adjusted hospital-based surveillance network at Mirzpur, Tangail, for surveillance on invasive childhood diseases like pneumonia, meningitis, typhoid and neonatal sepsis. Further expansion of this network is in progress, which is helpful for generation of data on infectious diseases mainly caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, Salmonella Typhi/Paratyphi, etc. Findings from his team have contributed to a better understanding of the burden of such diseases and have had major impact on public health policies. Their findings on H. influenzae type b and S. pneumoniae and advocacy played a significant role in the introduction of Hib and PCV vaccines in Bangladesh.
Dr. Saha and his team currently work on different projects funded by BMGF, WHO and UNICEF and have successfully completed several projects funded by USAID, NIH, etc. He is the Principal Investigator of the multi-site and multi-country project on Aetiology of Neonatal Infection in South Asia (ANISA) project. ANISA project is currently being conducted in three South Asian countries, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and is a major international effort to determine the causes of community-based neonatal infections. He collaborates with renowned institutes like Johns Hopkins University, University, University of Washington, Cardiff University, Fondation Mérieux and strives to bridge the gap between the developing world with high child mortality and the developed world with state-of-the-art diagnostics.
He has published more than 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He is an associate at the Johns Hopkins University, an adjunct scientist at the icddr,b, a member of the National Committee for Immunization Policies of the Government of Bangladesh, WHO’s laboratory Technical Working Group for Invasive Bacterial Vaccine Preventable Diseases (IB-VPD) and iTAG for strategic review of the IB-VPD network.