Congratulations to Dr Mohamed A. Hammoud, who was awarded the Kirby Institute’s Postgraduate Student Prize for 2020.
Dr Hammoud is a Research Fellow with the Kirby Institute’s HIV Epidemiology and Prevention Program (HEPP).
He completed his PhD studies this year with HEPP, under the primary supervision of Associate Professor Garrett Prestage and secondary supervision of Dr Jeff Jin. His paper, ‘HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) uptake among gay and bisexual men in Australia and factors associated with the nonuse of PrEP among eligible men: Results from a prospective cohort study’, revealed that men who were relatively less sexually active or less socially connected were less likely to initiate PrEP, due to a perceived lower risk of acquiring HIV.
Dr Hammoud’s paper was published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (JAIDS) in 2019.
The Kirby Institute Postgraduate Student Prize is an annual award given to the most significant first author paper by a Kirby Institute student, published in the previous calendar year in a peer-reviewed journal in the area of infectious diseases.
Dr Hammoud presented his paper at the Kirby Institute Seminar Series online last week, where Professor Anthony Kelleher, director of the Kirby Institute, virtually ‘presented’ the award and commended Dr Hammoud’s influential work.