For his remarkable achievements in the area of laboratory strengthening and substantive contribution to national capacity building for tuberculosis control around the world.
Dr Van Deun is an international leader on improving laboratory testing for tuberculosis. His efforts have had an impact on the quality of work performed by laboratory technologists around the world, resulting in untold thousands of lived saved through diagnosis of tuberculosis followed by effective treatment. He pioneered research demonstrating that systematic, random blind checks were critical for ensuring the quality of microscopy results and then travelled the world, educating an entire generation of laboratory leaders, who in turn built the capacity of laboratories in their countries to provide reliable microscopic diagnosis of tuberculosis.
A native of Belgium, Dr Van Deun earned his medical degree at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1978 and later completed specialty training in laboratory medicine at the same institution. Since 1999 he has been a researcher at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp.