City of Tampere’s Research Grant Committee has awarded Best doctoral dissertations in 2019. One of the three prizes (€5.000 each) was given to Doctor of Philosophy Wendi Wu for her PhD dissertation: Immunization Safety Monitoring and Vaccine Safety Assessment in China
China has a total population of over 1.3 billion people and an annual birth cohort of 16 million children. Because of increasing demand for vaccines and the development of new manufacturing techniques, China now ranks among the world’s largest vaccine manufacturers, producing over one billion vaccine doses annually. Some of these vaccines are also being introduced to children in countries across Asia. As more vaccines are being introduced in immunization programs worldwide, high quality safety surveillance is critical to maintain public confidence in vaccines. The National Surveillance System for vaccine-related adverse events is currently the sole data source available for nation-wide monitoring of the safety of vaccines manufactured and used in China. The studies in this dissertation evaluated how well this system works and used these unique data source to research important vaccine safety topics.
Wendi Wu comes from Beijing, China. She earned a BSc. in Human Medicine at Hebei Medical University, China and a MSc. in Human Medicine at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, China. She is a graduate of the International Doctoral Programme in Epidemiology and Public Health (IPPE) at Tampere University. She currently works at the Chinese National Immunization Program in Beijing. This research project was a collaborative effort of China’s National Immunization Program and Tampere University.
Tampere University Foundation and the Industrial Research Fund at Tampere University of Technology gave out prizes (€1.500 each) to all dissertations approved with distinction in 2019. In 2019 there were three of those from Epidemiology/ IPPE programme!
- PhD Kishor Hadkhale, epidemiology: Occupational Exposure and Risk of Bladder Cancer: Population based studies in the Nordic Countries and Canada
- PhD Irmina Michalek, epidemiology: Occupational Exposures and Risk of Kidney and Renal Pelvis Cancer in the Nordic Countries
- M.D. Atte Nikkilä, epidemiology: Low doses of ionizing radiation and the risk of childhood leukemia
Congratulations to all award-winners!