Born: 12 May 1933, Australia
Died: 12 May 2022
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Ruth Frances Langford
The following is republished with permission from the Victorian Honour Roll of Women.
Professor Ruth Bishop was the first person to discover the virus that causes gastroenteritis in the 1970s.
Ruth Bishop graduated from the University of Melbourne with her first Science degree in 1954. Following that, she worked constantly on the study of gastroenteritis – a disease which kills five million people each year and is particularly devastating to young children and people in underdeveloped countries.
In 1968, Ruth returned to work at the gastroenterological research unit at the Royal Children’s Hospital. It was fortunate that Ruth was in Melbourne when an epidemic broke out in 1973. Ruth, the senior scientist of the unit, had been attempting to isolate the cause of the disease and suspected the culprit was a virus. Using an electron microscope on tissue samples taken from one of the affected children, she discovered a single unknown virus that was responsible for the disease, the ‘rotavirus’.
Since making this discovery, the unit has remained in the forefront of world research into the subject and the development of a vaccine. Ruth has become one of the world’s leading authorities on the rotavirus. She has twice been chairperson of World Health Organisation scientific working committees related to diarrhoeal diseases. She received the 1978 Selwyn Smith Medical Research Prize and she earned a Doctor of Science degree. Ruth was appointed Professor in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Melbourne in 1995. She has been the Senior Principal Research Fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council since 1992. She is also a member of the politics and networking group, Women in Medical Science.
The following biography has been shared from The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation, published by the Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Ruth Bishop was a microbiologist noted as leader of the team that discovered human rotavirus, the most common cause of gastroenteritis in children. The development of a vaccine led to a successful vaccination program for all infants in Australia since 2007 and of millions of infants world-wide. Further research was directed to the development of a vaccine for babies at birth, for use in developing countries where this is likely to be the only time such children see a doctor. Bishop played key roles in WHO initiatives in vaccine development and research into diarrhoeal diseases. Bishop was a research assistant at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne, where she worked in the Department of Gastroenterology as a microbiologist. She was later appointed a Research associate in the University of Melbourne’s Department of Paediatrics.
Chronology
1954
Education – Bachelor of Science (BSc), University of Melbourne
1958
Education – Master of Science (MSc), University of Melbourne
1961
Education – Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Melbourne
1962 – 1965
Career position – Research Fellow, Department of Surgery, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom
1968 – 1974
Career position – Research Fellow at the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)
1968 – 1974
Career position – Research Fellow, Department of Gastroenterology, Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne
1975 – 1979
Career position – Senior Research Fellow at the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)
1978
Career position – President, Paediatric Research Association of Australia
1978
Award – Selwyn-Smith Prize for Clinical Research, University of Melbourne
1978
Education – Doctor of Science (DSc), University of Melbourne
1978 – 2008
Career position – Fellow, Australian Society for Microbiology
1980 – 1983
Career position – Chairman, Biosafety Committee, Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne
1980 – 1989
Career position – Principal Research Fellow at the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)
1981 – 1989
Career position – Senior Associate, Department of Paediatrics, University of Melbourne
1983 – 1985
Career position – Chairman, Steering Committee of the Global Scientific Working Group on Viral Diarrhoeal Disease, World Health Organisation (WHO)
1989 –
Career position – Director, WHO Collaborating Laboratory for Research on Human Rotaviruses
1989 – 1992
Career position – Member of Committee, WHO Program for Vaccine Development
1990 – 1991
Career position – Chief Executive Officer, Research Foundation, Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne, Melbourne
1990 – 1994
Career position – Professorial Associate, Department of Paediatrics, University of Melbourne
1991 – 1992
Career position – Director, Amrad Corporation
1991 – 1999
Career position – Member, Regional Grants Interviewing Committee, National Health and Medical Research Council
1992 –
Career position – Special Advisor, Programme for Vaccine Development, WHO/UNDP
1992 – 1999
Career position – Senior Principal Research Fellow at the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)
1994
Award – Gold Medal, Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne
1995 – 2015
Career position – Professorial Fellow, Department of Paediatrics, University of Melbourne
1996
Award – Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in recognition of service to medical research, particularly for her contributions to the understanding of gastroenteritis in children
1997
Award – White Flame Award, Save the Children Fund, Melbourne
1997
Award – Warren Hayes Memorial Medal, Committee for Melbourne
1998
Award – Clunies Ross National Science and Technology Award, Ian Clunies Ross Memorial Foundation
1998
Award – Pasteur Award, Children’s Vaccine Initiative, Geneva, Switzerland
1999 –
Career position – Director, National Rotavirus Surveillance Centre
1999 – 2009
Career position – Member, Rotavirus Working Group, Bill and Melinda Gates Children’s Vaccine Program
1999 – 2009
Career position – Senior Principal Research Fellow, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Melbourne
2001
Award – Inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women
2008 – 2022
Award – Honorary Fellow, Royal Australasian College of Physicians
2008 – 2022
Award – Honorary Life Member, Australian Society for Microbiology
2009
Award – Doctor of Medical Science (DMedSc), honoris causa, University of Melbourne
2009 – 2015
Award – Honorary Fellow, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Melbourne
2011
Award – Prince Mahidol Award in the Field of Public Health, Thailand
2013
Award – CSL Florey Medal, Australian Institute of Policy and Science
2019
Award – Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) – for eminent service to global child health through the development of improved vaccines for paediatric gastroenteritis, and to medical research