Monash University’s Professor Catriona Bradshaw, from the Sub Faculty of Translational Medicine and Public Health, in Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, and The Alfred’s Melbourne Sexual Health Centre, has been named as a member of the 2025 TIME100 Health, the annual list – by TIME Magazine – of the world leaders shaping the future of health.
Professor Bradshaw has achieved this honour in recognition of her more than 20 years researching the condition, bacterial vaginosis (BV), a condition affecting one in four women of reproductive age worldwide and causing miscarriage, premature births and increased risk of HIV.
Professor Bradshaw believed that the traditional understanding and treatment of BV as an imbalance (disruption) of the vaginal microbiome, led to the condition being wrongly managed, and treated exclusively as a female condition only, resulting in more than 50 per cent of women experiencing rapid recurrence.
As the principal investigator on a landmark study published in March in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), her work revealed that BV is in fact a sexually transmitted infection (STI), paving the way for a revolution in how it is treated.
An accompanying editorial in the NEJM, said the study would lead to a “major paradigm shift” in the way the condition will be treated, essentially with a simple, short and cheap course of topical and oral antibiotics given to male partners of women at the time they are treated for BV.
TIME Magazine said that Professor Bradshaw’s inclusion in the TIME100Health list was due to her contribution in “leading change in health and driving meaningful change toward a healthier world for all.”
Professor Bradshaw said it was an enormous honour to be recognised in the List, “which belongs to my colleagues in this study as well,” she said.
“At a time when sexual health and women’s health research is under-valued and threatened, this award has even greater significance and meaning,” she added.
ENDS
For more Monash media stories, visit our news and events site
Contact details:
Monash University
Tania Ewing Media and Communications Contractor
E: [email protected]
T: +61 (0) 408 378 422
For general media enquiries please contact:
Monash Media
E: [email protected]
T: +61 (0) 3 9903 4840
