Professor Lidia Morawska wins the Prime Minister’s 2025 Prize for Science and a good thing too.
She is honoured for her career-work on “air quality and its impact on human health and the environment.” What the citation understates is that by sticking to what the evidence shows she helped us, as in humanity, cope with COVID 19 – despite ambivalence and indifference among the science policy and research establishment that went on way too long.
Professor Morawska was explaining that COVID 19 transmission is airborne when the academic orthodoxy was amputate your hand rather than shake anybody else’s and use the remaining one to disinfect the groceries. In December 2020 she published an article with Donald K Milton which starkly made the case.
“Studies by the signatories and other scientists have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that viruses are released during exhalation, talking, and coughing in microdroplets small enough to remain aloft in air and pose a risk of exposure at distances beyond 1–2 m from an infected individual.
“We appeal to the medical community and to the relevant national and international bodies to recognize the potential for airborne spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).”
Not as snappy as Dustin Hoffman realising “It's airbone!” but a textbook example of what decades of science can accomplish. Professor Morawaska has researched at QUT for 30 years.
It took time for the World Health Organisation to accept that poor ventilation was linked to super-spreader events, the result as she put it was “science rejected, lives lost.” She sets out the timeline here.
There is way more to Morawska’s life-time of work on air quality than COVID – have a look at her publication record, starting in 1983 HERE. And she would been honoured by the plaudits of her peers without it, but perhaps not being one of TIME Magazine’s 100 influential people for 2021, a L’Oreal-UNESCO award winner and now the PM’s pick of scientists for the year.
And she works on. Mr Albanese’s announcement came two days after her new paper with QUT colleagues on the necessity for regulation of in-door air quality to protect health and reduce infection. There are more huzzahs to come.