In recognition of her exceptional contributions to the fields of infectious diseases and clinical microbiology, Evelina Tacconelli received the prestigious ESCMID Lifetime Achievement award during the opening ceremony on 27th April 2024.

About the Award

The ESCMID Lifetime Achievement Award honours a deserving member for their outstanding contribution to the ESCMID mission, which is to champion medical progress in infection for a healthier tomorrow. 

Hear from Evelina

“I am honoured to receive this Lifetime Achievement Award. ESCMID’s mission, to improve infection management and advance science, means a lot to me and is at the heard of my work and that of my colleagues in Verona: producing high-level scientific evidence in the field of infectios diseases to improve the care of patients. Nothing is more important than this”.

Work on the REVERSE Project

REVERSE develops and implements cost-effective stratagies and tools for the prevention and clinical mananement of healthcare-associated infections due to multidrug-resistant organizims, aiming to reduce the burden of antimicrobial resistance in high-prevelance healthcare settings.

Professor Tacconelli is the co-lead of work package 4, which focuses on antibiotic stewardship. 

Biography

Evelina Tacconelli is the Director of the Infectious Diseases Section at Verona University Hospital, Italy, and serves as the Senior Consultant on Antimicrobial Resistance at the Department of Internal Medicine, DZIF Clinical Research Unit at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Formerly the ESCMID Guideline Officer, she is now Chair of the European Committee for Infection Control (EUCIC) and Chief Scientific Officer of ECRAID, the largest European clinical research network on research in the field of infectious diseases.

Evelina coordinated on the 2017 Priority Pathogen List for new, effective antibiotics for R&D with the WHO, and served as consultant for the WHO and ECDC (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) in the field of antimicrobial stewardship and infection control. She currently coordinates the CTS OPERA Working Group on optimising antibiotics prescriptions for AIFA, the Italian Medicine Agency, as well as the Cohort Coordination Board, which links major European projects with a cohort design assessing infectious diseases with pandemic potential.

Under her leadership, her teams have actively participated in and coordinated numerous European projects and networks focused on clinical and epidemiological aspects of antimicrobial-resistant infections and SARS-CoV-2 infection, including the ORCHESTRA project. Evelina’s significant research contributions are encapsulated in over 300 peer-reviewed publications.

Discover ESCMID Global’s Interview with Professor Tacconelli