Rosalind Franklin Society honors UST RCNAS professor

Prof. Donna May D. Papa, RMT, Ph.D., DPAM, Department of Biological Sciences academic staff, has received the 2023 Rosalind Franklin Society (RFS) Special Award in Science.

The Rosalind Franklin Society’s Awards in Science 2023, in partnership with the publishing company Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., honors the best paper by a woman or underrepresented minority in Science in each of Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.’s 100 peer-reviewed journals. RFS executive director Karla Shepard Rubinger, in an email, shared to Papa that “This prestigious recognition is a testament to your remarkable contributions and dedication to advancing scientific knowledge.”

Papa’s paper “‘Two Is Better Than One’: The Multifactorial Nature of Phage-Antibiotic Combinatorial Treatments Against ESKAPE-Induced Infections” was published in PHAGE, volume 4, issue number 2, and co-authored with Gale Bernice N. Fungo, John Christian W. Uy, Kristiana Louise J. Porciuncula, Chiarah Mae A. Candelario, Deneb Philip S. Chua, Tracey Antaeus D. Gutierrez.

Dr. Donna Papa finished her PhD in Biological Sciences and her MS in Microbiology from the University of Santo Tomas. She founded the Bacteriophage Ecology, Aquaculture, Therapy and Systematics (BEATS) research group, the first Bacteriophage research group in the Philippines. She has previously brought home the National Academy of Science and Technology Outstanding Scientific Paper Award 2022, for her and her colleagues’ paper titled “Comparing the efficacy of bacteriophages and antibiotics in treating Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium on Streptomycen-pretreated Mice.”

She is currently a part of the Pure and Applied Microbiology research cluster of the UST Research Center for the Natural Sciences and Applied Sciences (RCNAS). She has mentored 165 students and is now receiving grants to pursue further research on phages to address antimicrobial resistance in the Philippines.

The Rosalind Franklin Society, the only organization of its kind, was established in 2007 by Mary Ann Liebert, founder and chairman of Mary Ann Liebert Inc., a leading independent publisher of scientific, technical and medical content, now in its 44th year.