The Daily News is proud to have named Dr. Pei-Yong Shi as its 35th annual Citizen of the Year.
During an event Wednesday night in Galveston, Shi was honored along with 19 other finalists nominated by members of the community to stand for the award.
Naming the one from among that group of worthy citizens always is a hard decision for the panel of judges who reviewed and ranked each of the 20 applications.
Ultimately, however, no other nominee contributed more to the public good over the preceding year than Shi, whose study of, and contribution to our understanding of, COVID delivered global benefit.
He led a team of researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch that contributed markedly to the development of a vaccine against COVID-19.
Thousands of people who otherwise would have died are alive today because of the work of Shi and his team at the medical branch.
“In my career of 30 years, there are drugs coming from my hands that have been approved and used on humans, including for HIV in AIDS patients,” Shi told a Daily News reporter in 2021.
“That was really gratifying. But compared to this one, this one is 100 times, 1,000 times bigger. The impact of it, the magnitude of it, it’s global. It’s everybody.”
The team at the University of Texas Medical Branch also is teaming up with global health care giant Novartis Pharmaceutical Co. to combat emerging pandemic threats.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded a partnership of Shi’s team and Novartis, called the UTMB-Novartis Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness, a $56 million grant to establish one of nine Antiviral Drug Discovery Centers for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern, according to the medical branch.
The center will operate in Galveston and be led by Shi as principal investigator.
The medical branch team worked with counterparts at Novartis to jointly write the grant proposal, which identified three viruses that would be targeted through their research — SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID 19, Flavivirus, which are viruses most commonly transmitted through mosquitoes and Henipaviruses, normally carried by bats and can be deadly in humans, Shi said.
Likewise, we honor and thank the 19 finalists nominated along with Shi. They represent a cross-section of the community, and seeing so many doing such good work day in and day out makes us proud and gives us hope for the future.
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Congtratulatios to Dr. Pei-Yong Shi. I'm thrilled to see this recognition of the public value of science and scientists.
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