Marina Finnamore
Marina cycles for global hygiene!
Fundraising for London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Story
My good friend, Professor Val Curtis passed away in October 2020, due to cancer, at the age of 62. She was the Director of the Environmental Health Group at LSHTM, still becoming a fierce old battleaxe (in her own words), and was an inspirational professor, colleague, teacher, mother, friend and life partner. She was fiercely intelligent, blunt, silly, driven and focused, always asking herself how she could do more, how she could have a bigger impact on the world.
The Queen of Hygiene
The only person probably ever to give a speech at the United Nations waving around a plastic poo, Val almost single handedly put hygiene on the map. She had a multidisciplinary background, spanning engineering, public health, and evolutionary anthropology and was the first ‘disgustologist,’ being the primary instigator of the hypothesis that disgust could be explained as an evolved response to environmental threats of disease.
Val was especially committed to making an impact in Sub-Saharan Africa, having lived and worked in Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Burkina Faso, where we were raised in our early years, and in India, where she considered her contributions as a behaviour change advisor to the nationwide Swachh Bharat campaign to end open defecation as one of the great privileges of her life.
Marching Orders
Although Val’s ambition and drive cannot be replaced, her marching
orders were to ensure that the work to achieve global hygiene goals continues. We want this fund to be used to enable the next generation of global health leaders to take up the challenge and continue her legacy. Please consider donating!
