Flashback to 2001 and our Dr Helen Row Award winner was Professor James Scott, then a graduate: fast forward to 2021 and Prof Scott is a leading researcher working to free young people from the burden of severe mental illness such as psychosis.

Over the past 20 years he has made some ground breaking discoveries, notably leading the first study correlating exposure to child maltreatment with severity of psychosis symptoms. His story is told on the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital (RBWH)  website alongside many other stories of ground-breaking research led by Queenslanders. The story link is here.

We would like to think our award set him on his path to research success, with additional research grants providing the clinician researcher with valuable time needed to solve questions they come across almost every day.

“Grants bridge the gap between asking an important clinical question and doing the work to answer it. They enable researchers to employ an extra staff member to collect data, to get the ethics in, to keep everything in order so that you’re complying with research integrity - all those things which if you area busy clinician you just don’t have time to do.”

Zonta Club of Brisbane established the Dr Helen Row Award in 1992 and since then we have been awarding an annual prize of $3000 which goes to the University of Queensland medical student, male or female, with the highest combined marks in the paediatrics and mental health clinical rotations.

We are very proud to award this year’s prize to Sarah Cameron, who achieved the highest combined marks in the Paediatrics and Mental Health clinical rotations for her year, which is an outstanding effort given the challenges many faced in 2020.