ASAP Awards – Winners Announced

Fabiana Kubke | PLOS.org | October 21, 2013

Earlier this month the six finalists for the ASAP awards were named. They represented six outstanding contributions to innovation that exploited Open Access. The 3 winners were announced at a kickoff event at the World Bank in Washington DC, on the Monday of Open Access Week 2013. This year’s OAW theme is “Redefining Impact” and few project speak more to that than the six finalists of the ASAP.

Nitika Pant Pai, Caroline Vadnais, Roni Deli-Houssein and Sushmita Shivkumar, developed a mobile phone app that will help people affected with HIV use a home diagnostic test and then connect with the right kind of information and the right kind of people. I asked Nitika about the project and about winning the award. Here is what she had to say:

The award inspires me to do more—and i thank God for rewarding hard work- and my family and my trainees for being there for me. I share this award with my extended family of trainees- Roni, Caroline and Sush who put in many hours of work with me. All of them pitched in, with their different perspectives. I am grateful to Open access— a movement that i strongly support, give my time and strongly believe in. i am an editorial board member of Plos one and review for Plos Med and several other open access journals.And i thank my sponsors—Google –and Wellcome Trust.