Professor Stephen Davis honoured

Professor Stephen Davis has been recognised in the recent Order of Australia awards.

Professor Stephen Davis was awarded the Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in the Queen's Birthday honours list 2021 for distinguished service to medical education, to stroke research, and to the management of cerebrovascular disease.

Stephen is the Professor of Translational Neuroscience in the Department of Medicine, Director of the Melbourne Brain Centre at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and a Past-President of the World Stroke Organization.

Along with long term colleague, Professor Geoffrey Donnan AO, he co-chairs a $40 million grant through the Frontiers Health and Medical Research initiative. This five-year program will lay the foundations for a national and equitable approach to the urgent, pre-hospital treatment of stroke to urban, rural and remote Australia. The University of Melbourne is one of seven principal partners of this landmark project.

As well, Stephen co-chairs the Melbourne Mobile Stroke Unit program, the catalyst for the new Fontiers initiative.

He is a co-chair of the Australian Chinese Training Initiative of Neurology (ACTION). Stephen is a Past-President of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Neurologists (ANZAN) and the Stroke Society of Australasia (SSA). He chairs the International Scientific Committee of Brain Research New Zealand.

Stephen has received numerous awards including the 2011 William Feinberg Award from the American Stroke Association, the 2012 Karolinska Award and the 2014 JJ Wepfer Award from the European Stroke Council, 2018 Stroke Leadership Award from the World Stroke Organization and the 2019 Chinese Stroke Association International Cooperation Award. He was elected as an inaugural Fellow in the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences in 2015.

His research is focussed on acute therapy for both ischemic stroke and intracerebral haemorrhage, particularly the use of advanced imaging in selection of therapy. He is a consulting editor for Stroke and serves on editorial boards of the International Journal of Stroke, the European Stroke Journal and the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience. He is the Principal Investigator of an NHMRC stroke program grant 2017-2021 and a MRFF grant on use of tranexamic acid in the mobile stroke unit for intracerebral haemorrhage. He has an h-index of 93, has co-authored three books, numerous book chapters, and more than 540 peer-reviewed research papers.