UM's Colwell Awarded 2010 Stockholm Water Prize

	Rita Colwell

COLLEGE Park, Md. -- Distinguished University Professor Rita R. Colwell has been awarded the 2010 Stockholm Water Prize, widely recognized as the world's premier award for water related research or policy work. The prize, which includes a $150,000 award and a crystal sculpture, honors "individuals, institutions or organizations whose work contributes broadly to the conservation and protection of water resources and to improved health of the planet's inhabitants and ecosystems."

Colwell, who joined the University of Maryland faculty in 1973, is a renowned scientist and educator, whose work bridges many areas including microbiology, ecology, public health, and computer and satellite technology. Her pioneering research in prevention of cholera and other waterborne infectious diseases has helped protect the health and lives of millions.

Colwell has been studying cholera for more than 45 years, combining high tech instruments with molecular biology to make major advances in detecting outbreaks. "We're using satellites to correlate sea height and sea temperature in order to predict and reduce cholera epidemics," she said. "It's proven to be uncannily effective because outbreaks are associated with plankton blooms."

In fact, Colwell's work has established a basis for environmental and infectious disease risk assessment used around the world.

However, Colwell has worked not just to identify and assess disease risk, but also to reduce it. She is a long-time leader of efforts to combat waterborne diseases by finding and promoting those clean-water technologies -- from filtration of drinking water with sari cloth to high-tech treatment plants -- most appropriate to a particular region or situation.

"Dr. Colwell's numerous seminal contributions towards solving the world's water and water-related public health problems, particularly her work to prevent the spread of cholera, is of utmost global importance," noted the Stockholm Water Prize Nominating Committee in its citation. "Through her research on its physiology, ecology, and metabolism, Dr. Colwell advanced the fields of mathematics, genetics and remote sensing technology and not only as they relate to [cholera] bacteria but to the prevention of other diseases in many developing countries."

	Water Prize crystal sculpture

Revolutionizing the Fight against Cholera
In the 1960's, Colwell observed that the causative agent for cholera, the bacterium, Vibrio cholerae, could survive by attaching to plankton. This led to her groundbreaking discovery that certain bacteria, including Vibrio species, can become dormant in rivers, lakes and oceans under conditions adverse for growth, only to revert to an actively growing state when conditions are again favorable. The environment thus serves as reservoir of infection.

These findings contradicted the then conventional wisdom that cholera was only spread by person to person contact, food or drinking water and that its presence in the environment could only be due to the release of sewage. As a result of this, scientists are now able to link changes in the natural environment to the spread of disease.

Colwell and her colleagues have shown how changes in climate, adverse weather events, shifts in ocean circulation, and other ecological processes can create conditions that allow infectious diseases to spread. And through knowledge of that link, she has led the crafting of preemptive policies to minimize outbreaks. Her research in the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh, for example, demonstrated that warmer surface ocean temperatures stimulates growth of cholera-hosting zooplankton and is associated with an increase in the number of cholera cases.

In the United States she was the first to lead research experiments on the impact of El Niño on human health and the aquatic environment. In the 1990s, Colwell was one of the first scientists to research the impacts of climate change on the spread of infectious diseases. She serves on dozens of international panels, including the Global Health Assembly, and as a top government public health advisor on adaptation strategies to climate change.

High Tech & Low
During her career, Colwell has bridged work at the forefront of science and technology with a lifelong dedication to crafting practical solutions for clean drinking water and protection of human and ecosystem health through understanding the ecology of infectious diseases.

Colwell -- who holds appointments both at the University of Maryland (Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics) and the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health -- developed the first model that applied remote satellite imaging to track and predict outbreaks of cholera before they occur. This model has become an archetype for infectious disease monitoring and prevention used around the world. And she helped create and lead bioinformatics -- a field that combines biology, computer science and information technology -- to an exponentially advanced understanding, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of waterborne diseases.

Yet, she has said she may be proudest of perhaps her simplest idea: using folded sari cloth to filter from drinking water plankton with which the cholera bacterium is associated. The method was shown to reduce the incidence of the disease 48 percent across 65 villages in Bangladesh

	Bangladeshi women at a local water source filtering water with sari cloth

A Lifetime of Scientific Leadership
Colwell was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, in the United States in 1934. She has authored or coauthored 17 books and more than 750 scientific publications. Over the years, Colwell has worked extensively to spread community-based water safety education and viable, low-cost technological innovations in communities throughout South Asia and in Africa. During the cholera pandemic in Latin and South America in the 1990s, Colwell's worked as national advisor to multiple governments. In Ecuador, her contributions to the detection of Vibrio cholerae in hospitals and in the shrimp industry saved lives. In Ecuadore and Peru, she was honored by the national governments for her work in developing drinking water criteria that helped guide policies to curb the spread of the disease.

Colwell has held many advisory positions in the U.S. government, in non-profit science-policy organizations, within private foundations, and in the international scientific research community. Colwell served as director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1998 to 2004. She was the NSF's first woman director and the first with a life sciences background. Colwell has been recognized for the great impact and breadth of her work with many previous honors including induction into the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2000, and the National Medal of Science, the United State's highest honor for science, awarded in 2006.

A passionate educator, her major interests also include primary and high school science and mathematics education, graduate science and engineering education, and the increased participation of women and minorities in science and engineering.

About the Stockholm Water Prize
H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, who is the patron of the Prize, will formally present Dr. Colwell with the 2010 Stockholm Water Prize at a Royal Award Ceremony in Stockholm City Hall on September 9 during the 2010 World Water Week in Stockholm. The Stockholm Water Prize is a global award founded in 1990 and presented annually by the Stockholm International Water Institute, "a policy institute that contributes to international efforts to combat the world's escalating water crisis."

Founders of the Stockholm Water Prize are Swedish and international companies in cooperation with the City of Stockholm. They are: Bacardi, Borealis & Borouge, DuPont, Europeiska Insurance, Fujitsu, General Motors, Grundfos Management, Hewlett Packard, ITT Water & Wastewater, Kemira Water, KPMG Sweden, Läckeby Water, P&G, Ragn-Sells, Scandic, Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), Siemens AG, SJ (Swedish Railways), Snecma, Uponor, Water Environment Federation and Ålandsbanken Sverige.

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