Dr. Bud Tennant, Emeritus James Law Professor of Comparative Medicine, has been awarded the 2016 Baruch S. Blumberg Prize by the Hepatitis B Foundation. Dr. Tennant was unanimously selected for the prize in honor of his pioneering work with hepatitis B infection in woodchucks, the first and only animal model successfully used to definitively identify potential and approved therapeutics for hepatitis B.

“Humanity owes a tremendous debt to Dr. Tennant for his pioneering work in hepatitis research, which has been among the most important in the field,” said Dr. Timothy Block, president of the Hepatitis B Foundation and its research arm, the Baruch S. Blumberg Institute. “We are proud to present him with the highest scientific honor that we confer, and thank him for his years of dedicated research which has made it possible for us to envision a world without hepatitis B.”

The Hepatitis B Foundation is the nation’s leading nonprofit organization solely dedicated to finding a cure for hepatitis B and improving the quality of life for those affected worldwide through research, education and patient advocacy. The prize is named for Dr. Baruch S. Blumberg, who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1976 for his discovery of the hepatitis B virus. He and his colleagues also developed the blood test that is used to detect the virus and invented the first hepatitis B vaccine in 1969. A co-founder of the Hepatitis B Foundation Dr. Blumberg was actively involved with the organization until his passing in 2011.