A recent University of Southampton graduate has received a prestigious international honour for her work promoting family planning and reproductive health.
Dr Kizanne James was one of the 2017 winners of ‘120 Under 40: The New Generation of Family Planning Leaders’, named by The Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Kizanne graduated from the University’s MSc Leadership and Management in Health and Social Care this summer.
She is a medical doctor from Trinidad and Tobago and has promoted family planning since she was at medical school, delivering voluntary talks on sexual health and developing a phone app and website offering information about contraception.
Kizanne says:
I feel really honoured and excited to have won this award – it means so much to my work in sexual and reproductive health in the Caribbean. It was an extremely competitive process, I was up against experts from all over the world.
Kizanne will receive $1,000 from the Gates Institute to continue her work in family planning.
The accolade comes after Kizanne won a Women in Science Engineering and Technology (WiSET) award earlier this year. She was also chosen to become a World Contraception Day Ambassador in 2016.
