Quarraisha Abdool Karim Awarded the 2025 Virchow Prize
The Virchow Foundation has awarded the Virchow Prize 2025 to Columbia Mailman School Professor Quarraisha Abdool Karim and global child health expert Zulfiqar A. Bhutta. The prize recognizes their pioneering, lifelong leadership in advancing maternal, newborn, and child health equity through community-centered, evidence-based research, particularly in support of some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.
Abdool Karim, an infectious diseases epidemiologist, is Associate Scientific Director of The Centre for the Aids Programme of Research in Durban, South Africa (CAPRISA) and Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School. Zulfiqar A. Bhutta is a pediatrician and public health scientist based at Aga Khan University in Pakistan and the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto.
With its annual awarding of the Virchow Prize, the non-profit Virchow Foundation highlights and supports the efforts of the United Nations to preserve the health of people and the planet by setting a leading example of underscoring health as an important entry point to the UN 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and emphasizing the health-related interdependencies of all 17 SDGs. The Virchow Prize 2025 award ceremony will take place on October 11 at Rotes Rathaus, Berlin City Hall.
In its announcement, the Foundation stated that the 2025 laureates have shaped health policies and practice by closing critical gaps in care for vulnerable populations, adding that their leadership has ensured that life-saving services reach those in low-resource and crisis-affected settings, where health systems are often weakest and disparities most acute.
“Though their paths are distinct, both laureates have helped redefine the global health architecture by focusing on those historically excluded from mainstream health systems and scientific discourse,” said Christoph Markschies, president of the Virchow Foundation and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW). “Both laureates epitomize Virchow’s tradition of integrating scientific rigor with social consciousness, advancing practices in global health that are empirically grounded, equity-driven, and politically transformative.”
Quarraisha Abdool Karim
Quarraisha Abdool Karim, a clinical epidemiologist affiliated with the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) and Columbia University, is internationally recognized for her leadership in HIV prevention among girls and young women, with far-reaching implications for maternal and adolescent health. Her leadership of the CAPRISA 004 trial provided the first proof that antiretroviral drugs could prevent HIV infection in women, a finding that has had a lasting impact on global HIV prevention efforts. She has also played a key role in building scientific capacity across Africa, mentoring a generation of women scientists. She holds the John C. Martin Chair in Global Health at CAPRISA and is Pro Vice-Chancellor (African Health) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is also president of the World Academy of Sciences and UNAIDS Special Ambassador for Adolescents and HIV. Earlier this year, she was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy.