2014 Rolex Awards for Enterprise

All aged 30 and under, the Young Laureates support domains as diverse as hearing impairment problems in babies, breeding of grey crowned-cranes, exploration of giant quartzite caves, screening for bacteria resistant to antibiotics or inventing touch screen Cardio Pads in Africa.

Five young visionaries from Africa, India, Europe and the Middle East were announced at London’s leading scientific institution, the Royal Society, as winners of the 2014 Rolex Awards for Enterprise.

This year’s Young Laureates - aged 30 and under - impress by both their leadership qualities and in their ability to harness technology in an original way to improve the well-being of the community and the environment, as well as to advance scientific knowledge.

The five Young Laureates were chosen by an international Jury of eight eminent experts who reviewed a shortlist from among 1,800 applicants from all over the world. The Laureates will each receive 50,000 Swiss francs to advance their projects.

Neeti Kailas (India, 29 years old)
While her classmates at India’s prestigious National Institute of Design (NID), in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, were creating stylish new versions of household products, or innovative fabrics, Neeti Kailas was redesigning the bedpan for India’s crowded public hospitals. «To me, design is about problem solving, and thinking about how I can have maximum impact on society. In a country like India,» she says.

The bedpan project sparked a passion to use design to transform health care. Together with her engineer husband Nitin Sisodia, Kailas launched the Sohum Innovation Lab, and the lab’s first product is a device to screen babies for hearing impairment. Kailas is personally connected to the project, through an Indian childhood friend who was born deaf.

Her friend is just one of many. Every year, some 100,000 hearing-impaired babies are born in India, but there is no routine screening countrywide to detect the condition, and the existing tests are expensive and require skilled health-care workers. Early screening is vital because, if left unaddressed, a hearing impairment can impede the development of speech, language, and cognition by the time a baby is six months old.

Kailas’s device works by measuring auditory brainstem response. Three electrodes are placed on the baby’s head to detect electrical responses generated by the brain’s auditory system when stimulated. If the brain does not respond to these aural stimuli, the child cannot hear. The device is battery-operated and non-invasive, which means babies do not need to be sedated, as some tests in the past have required. Since the equipment is inexpensive and portable, it can be used anywhere. «Another of the device’s major advantages over other testing systems is our patented, in-built algorithm that filters out ambient noise from the test signal. This was really important for us because, if you’ve ever been to health clinics in India, you’ll know how incredibly crowded and noisy they are,» says Kailas.

The unit is still a prototype, and Rolex Award funds will allow Kailas to start clinical trials later this year. Her plan is to launch it in 2016, first focusing on institutional (hospital) births, with the aim of screening 2% of such births in the first year, before scaling up on an annually accrued basis.

Kailas hopes that the screening programme can be adapted to include screening for impaired vision in newborns, or for identifying high-risk pregnancies.

Olivier Nsengimana (Rwanda, 30 years old)
Olivier Nsengimana graduated top of his class at veterinary school - after growing up in post-genocide Rwanda - and had his pick of government and lucrative industry positions. But his passion was saving Rwanda’s endangered animals.

He chose to volunteer as a field veterinarian for Gorilla Doctors as a way of giving back to his country. While the gorilla is a famously iconic symbol of Rwanda’s endangered species, many others are also under threat from poaching and habitat encroachment. Nsengimana is on a mission to save the grey crowned-crane, an endangered bird that is fast dying out in Rwanda because of illegal poaching.

In Rwanda, the crane is a symbol of wealth and longevity. With a golden tufted crown and a flame-red spot on its neck, it is a desirable pet for Rwanda’s elite. Despite a ban by the Rwandan Government on killing, injuring, capturing or selling endangered species, locals poach the birds and sell them as cheaply as chickens in markets. The result has been devastating for Rwanda’s only species of crane.

Nsengimana will spend the next two years dividing his time between field work with conservation organization Gorilla Doctors and trying to save the grey crowned-crane through two very different approaches. The project’s primary goal is to reintroduce captive cranes to their natural Rwandan habitat. Documentation will be key, and Nsengimana plans to first establish a national database of grey crowned-cranes in Rwanda, listing all those in captivity. A rehabilitation centre will be created in Akagera National Park, located in the north-east of the country. This centre will begin reintroductions to the wild - once Nsengimana has convinced people to release their cranes - as well as facilitate captive breeding programmes.

Convincing members of Rwanda’s elite to give up their birds is a sensitive issue. Nsengimana plans to tackle this by organizing the release of illegally kept birds through an amnesty programme. For support, he has reached out to the Rwanda Development Board, which is collaborating on the project, to encourage people to release their birds.

Another major aim is to stop the birds being poached from the wild. Nsengimana knows that for conservation to work in a country where poverty is widespread, it must address the need for local people to make a living. As part of his awareness-raising programme, Nsengimana will run a national media campaign to educate people about how to pursue livelihoods without threatening endangered species.

Francesco Sauro (Italy, 29 years old)
For scientist and explorer Francesco Sauro, the table-top mountains - tepuis - of South America h ave always h ad a powerful allure. «Not just because they are beautiful, which of course they are,» he says, «but because inside they’re actually a kind of lost world.» Towering over the savannah and rainforest that straddle south-eastern Venezuela and northern Brazil, the string of quartzite plateaus constitutes one of the globe’s most dramatic landscapes. But it also contains extensive cave structures, which harbour unique geological and biological features that have evolved over millennia in isolation from the surrounding environment.

As part of the Italian exploration association La Venta, and with the support of the Venezuelan team Theraphosa, Sauro has led five expeditions to the tepuis since 2009. They made several discoveries, including one of the world’s longest quartzite caves (Imawarì Yeuta with over 20 kilometres of passages), in Venezuela’s Auyan tepui. His research provided new insights into how these giant quartzite caves form. He also discovered the presence of a new mineral, rossiantonite, as well as other rare silica and sulphate formations. Additional finds include new cave animal species, such as a blind fish trapped in an underground river, which could reveal a close relationship to some African species - further evidence of the period when Africa and South America formed a super-continent.

Between November 2014 and November 2017, with the support of his Rolex Award for Enterprise and other sponsors, Sauro intends to lead a series of four expeditions into caves in the farthest tepuis of the Amazonas region: Duida-Marahuaka massif in southern Venezuela, and Pico da Neblina and Serra do Aracá in neighbouring Brazil. «Conditions will be challenging due to the remoteness of the locations and altitudes of up to 2,900 metres, but I think the rewards will be considerable,» Sauro says. «Because of the heavy rainfall in the region, there is likely to be extensive water erosion, which of course translates into even bigger caves.» He also believes that the new locations - further inland and far from previous research sites - will present very different ecosystems with variant geo-microbiological environments and unknown fauna.

The Award will fund a preliminary reconnaissance mission involving a three-to-five-man team that will survey the sites by helicopter. This will allow them to locate cave entrances and assess the caves’ speleological and scientific potential, as well as study logistical difficulties. It will also fund a second, multidisciplinary team who will then undertake a survey of the caves collecting geological and geomicrobiological data.

Arthur Zang (Cameroon, 26 years old)
By day, Arthur Zang may seem like any other university IT specialist, but by night, he uses his technological know-how to pioneer cardiac health care in his native Cameroon. Zang has invented the Cardio Pad - which is believed to be Africa’s first handheld medical computer tablet. It will allow health-care workers in rural areas to send the results of cardiac tests to specialists via a mobile phone connection.

The incidence of heart disease is rising in many low and middle-income countries around the world due to wealthier lifestyles and greater longevity. Cameroon is no exception. According to Cameroon’s Society of Cardiologists, some 30% of the country’s 22 million people suffer from high blood pressure, which is one of the key contributing factors to heart disease. Yet there are fewer than 50 heart specialists, most of whom are based in the cities of Douala and Yaoundé, leaving rural areas with virtually no cardiac care.

Zang’s patented touchscreen Cardio Pad could change that. His company, Himore Medical, will sell the Cardio Pad as part of a complete diagnostic kit for about US$ 2,000, less than half the price of other, less portable, systems. The other components in the kit are a wireless set of four electrodes and a sensor that attaches to the patient and transmits its signals via Bluetooth to the Cardio Pad. The kit takes a digitized electrocardiogram (ECG) reading of the patient’s heart function. The health-care worker who takes this reading then transmits this information to a national data centre. Once the ECG is received, a cardiologist makes a diagnosis and sends it back to the centre to be relayed to the health-care worker treating the patient, along with prescription instructions.

The Cardio Pad has the potential to become a complete telemedicine tool, allowing measurement and transmission of integrated information on a patient’s health profile, which could help diagnose many other diseases.

With his Award funds, Zang will produce 100 tablets, 10 for each of Cameroon’s provinces. «My goal is to have 500 Cardio Pads being used across Cameroon,» he says. He also wants to export the device to other regions such as central Africa and India.

Hosam Zowawi (Saudi Arabia, 29 years old)
Every day that 29-year-old microbiologist Hosam Zowawi spends in his laboratory makes him more aware that a nightmare scenario in which modern drugs fail to work could become reality. For his Ph.D at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, Zowawi is studying the way that bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics that help us fight off life-threatening infections such as pneumonia. While resistant strains of bacteria have been recognized for some time, microbiologists like Zowawi are increasingly discovering strains that are immune to all known antibiotics, rendering them so resilient that they have been dubbed «superbugs». Zowawi is studying patients who are dying of common conditions such as urinary tract infections - which would normally be treatable - because they harbour antibioticresistant bacteria.

Existing diagnostic tests are too slow to detect resistant bacteria, taking between 48-72 hours to yield results. This is too long for many patients who need urgent treatment, so doctors use trial and error to identify an antibiotic that works. Zowawi has developed a Rapid Superbug test that gives results in just three to four hours, potentially allowing doctors to prescribe an appropriate antibiotic. Zowawi is also developing a second test that will identify a family of bacteria that is particularly prone to developing antibiotic resistance. Both tests require highly specialized scientific equipment.

Zowawi is particularly interested in how superbugs are spreading through the Gulf states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates). In many of these states, poor prescription practices and the fact that antibiotics are sold freely over the counter mean that many people either take the wrong antibiotics, or take them when they are unnecessary, such as for viral infections. This misuse of antibiotics fuels bacterial resistance greatly, which is why a key component of Zowawi’s project involves raising awareness of the issue.

Since antibiotic-resistant bacteria can easily cross borders with people or animals, it was important for Zowawi to establish a region-wide system for monitoring antibiotic resistance. Unfortunately, many Middle-Eastern countries are unaccustomed to extensive cross-border collaboration. As Zowawi’s Ph.D kept him busy in Brisbane, establishing a network meant «long days and nights in front of my computer, firing off endless emails, convincing hospitals to take part». The effort has paid off, and Zowawi now has a collaborative network of seven Gulf-region hospitals that have agreed to share data about antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The campaign - the first region-wide Gulf effort of its kind - will include educational documentaries, flyers and infographics, and will make use of social-media platforms such as Twitter and YouTube. Zowawi is also consulting media experts to produce content for television, radio, and newspapers.

The Rolex Awards for Enterprise were initiated in 1976 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Oyster chronometer, the world’s first waterproof watch and a symbol of the innovation that the Awards programme supports. The programme recognizes enterprising men and women who are using their talents and initiative to change the world in five broad areas: science and health, applied technology, the environment, exploration and discovery, and cultural heritage.

In 2010, the first Awards devoted to Young Laureates honoured resourceful young men and women at a critical juncture in their careers. In addition to the prize money, the Young Laureates receive recognition of their projects through an international media campaign, access to the community of former Rolex Laureates and Jury members, and a Rolex chronometer.

August 27, 2014