Kellogg alumnus Dr Bipin Adhikari receives prestigious Emerging Leaders Award

We are thrilled to announce that Kellogg alumnus, Dr Bipin Adhikari (DPhil Clinical Medicine, 2016) has been recognised by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (RSTMH) with an Emerging Leader Award.

This accolade is for those who early in their careers have made significant contributions in leadership, mentoring, and capacity building to the fields of tropical medicine and global health.

Bipin explains what the award means to him: “I am very humbled to receive the Emerging Leaders Award by RSTMH for the year 2023. This recognition holds great significance for me, as it motivates me to continue the work in the field of Tropical Medicine and Global Health and it serves as an inspiration to actively share my knowledge and skills to the newcomers in the fest.”

Born and raised in rural Nepal on the foothills of the Himalayas, Bipin studied medicine in Henan, China and then worked for three years at the Trichandra Military Hospital in Kathmandu. From 2011-2013, he earned a Professional Diploma in Tropical Medicine & Hygiene (DTMH) and then an MSc in clinical tropical medicine from Mahidol University, Thailand. The next year, Bipin worked in a Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) camp in South Sudan, then with the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU). During his DPhil, Bipin worked on a mass antimalarial drug administration (MDA) project where he lived at a study site in eastern Savannakhet, Cambodia, near the Laos and Viet Nam, border, an area particularly hard hit by the Viet Nam War.

Dr Adhikari worked on community engagement with the target population to maximise the uptake and hence the coverage of the MDA. He found that while gaining trust is key, that is not an easy task if you are seen as a ’foreign body’. Bipin wrote a series of reports about this experience and received his DPhil in 2019. After graduating, he joined the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health as a post-doctoral researcher where he completed a realist review on community engagement with health research. In 2021, he joined the malaria department at MORU in Thailand to work on research related to malaria based in Cambodia. He continues his work around the social science aspects of malaria, infectious diseases, community engagement and broader public health issues based at MORU.

Find out more about the award on the RSTMH website here.