Connections Awards

Connections Awards are designed to promote One Medicine as a professional and academic discipline, and to facilitate career-building, cross-sector, One Medicine collaborations and partnerships.

The awards have two categories:

1. Student Connections Awards
2. Professional Connections Awards

A new round of Connections Awards will open in 2025. These will be announced on our Funding page and on the ONE Medicine Network.

Previous Connections Awards

Please note the scope of these awards may change for future calls.

Dr Jonas Hue (Professional Connections Award) 

King’s College London and National Dental Research Institute, Singapore 

Award date: April 2024 [Active project] 

Project: Small Animal Dentistry and Maxillofacial Surgery Partnership 

Dr Jonas Hue is a human dentist and researcher specialising in cancers of the head and neck. He is using his Connections Award to form a working partnership with specialists in veterinary dentistry and surgery.  

This funding will help the team to identify and initiate new research projects that can tackle devastating diseases of the head and neck, including cancer, which are likely to bring maximum benefit for both humans and companion animals. 

Human and animal head, neck, and mouth cancers have many similarities, and can even look very similar under the microscope. Yet despite this, veterinary research is still incredibly limited in this area.   Further, many AI models developed for human use in this field often remain within human medicine, despite their applicability to veterinary patients.

This collaboration will support more equitable medical progress in dentistry and maxillofacial surgery, without the use of animal models, in a cost‐effective and efficient manner.

Dr Hue said: “This funding definitely served its function in our case of fostering research collaboration. I think it would be very helpful to have more small grant calls for smaller scale projects for researchers looking to enter this space. With more advances with computational methods and many open-source software and datasets, lots of useful research findings can be generated with very little funds. These days I’ve found it increasingly difficult to apply for larger grants as I just would not need that much resources. So I think having some smaller grant calls may encourage more applications from a wider variety of researchers.”

Rita Pinheiro (Student Connections Award) 

ICBAS, Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas Abel Salazar, University of Porto, Portugal 

Award date: April 2024 [Active project] 

Title: Pet and Human Environmental Exposure: A Comparative study 

Rita Pinheiro is using her award to study the levels of environmental toxins in companion animals and the human guardians they live with.  

By analysing levels of common chemicals found in our homes in the urine of both species, Rita aims to understand whether this could be a good method for monitoring our exposure to potentially harmful levels of pollutants. 

Maxwell Dextler Ampofo (Student Connections Award) 

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana 

Award date: November 2024 [Active project] 

Title: Survey of One Medicine Awareness and Acceptance Among Healthcare Professionals in Ghana   

Maxwell is conducting a survey to understand how well healthcare professionals in Ghana, including human doctors, veterinarians, pharmacists, nurses, and biomedical scientists, are aware of and embrace the principles of One Medicine.  

The study aims to identify opportunities for enhanced collaboration and education that can foster a more integrated approach to health challenges. Maxwell hopes the results will help to inform policy recommendations, education, and professional development programmes aimed at strengthening the One Medicine approach in Ghana. 

Impact for One Medicine

This project supports the global acknowledgement of One Medicine, emphasising the need for multidisciplinary collaboration to address complex health issues.

It showcases the relevance of a holistic approach to human and animal health, which can only be achieved when health professionals from all sectors work together to provide better health outcomes for all species.