The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh Honours a Lister Fellow

We are delighted to report that in October 2017 Lister Institute Fellow Professor Michael Eddleston was awarded the Cullen Medal by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

This award is given every four years to recognise a distinguished clinician and their contribution to the practice of medicine, and it was awarded to Professor Eddleston to recognise his significant contribution to the field of pesticide and plant poisoning.

Professor Eddleston is Personal Chair of Clinical Toxicology at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Cardiovascular Science, where he carries out research that aims to reduce deaths from pesticide and plant self-poisoning in rural Asia. He is also Director of the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention (CPSP), a collaborative organisation set up to reduce the number of pesticide suicides worldwide.

Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention (CPSP) logo

The Lister Institute is very pleased to help support Professor Eddleston’s research through a prize fellowship, which has been important for funding his excellent work. As Professor Eddleston explains:

The Lister prize fellowship allowed me to successfully take on research across all aspects of the problem - whether high level descriptions of the effect of pesticide regulation on national suicide rates, complex and huge cluster RCTs to test the effectiveness of improved household storage on pesticide self-poisoning, or pre-clinical studies to identify novel treatments. These approaches are coming together to reduce pesticide suicides worldwide, benefiting individual patients and society. Without the Lister fellowship, the work would have been much more limited and less successful.

We’d like to thank Professor Eddleston for his kind words and look forward to hearing more about his work in the future. We have previously reported on this research, particularly on a recent Lancet publication that discussed the results of a large-scale study in Sri Lanka which had important public safety consequences.

If you would like to find out more about Professor Eddleston’s work and see his recent research publications, view his profile on the University of Edinburgh website, and to discover more about the Lister research prize that has helped support his studies, please view our prize fellowship information.