Erin Bowles and Dr. Dave Warshauer with their APHL awards.
Two Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene (WSLH) scientists – Erin Bowles MT (ASCP) and Dr. Dave Warshauer, PhD, D(ABMM) – were honored at the recent Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) annual meeting in Providence, RI.
Bowles, the Wisconsin Clinical Laboratory Network (WCLN) coordinator and co-biosafety officer at the WSLH, received the Emerging Leader Award. This award honors an individual whose leadership has been instrumental in one or more advances in laboratory science, practice, management, policy or education within his or her first five to ten years in the public health laboratory profession.
Bowles serves on APHL’s Sentinel Laboratories Training Collective Workgroup and the Sentinel Laboratories Partnership and Outreach Subcommittee. Sentinel laboratories are hospital and clinical laboratories that oftentimes are the first to recognize unusual infections or outbreaks and can alert public health officials. Bowles has been a leader in the development of national sentinel laboratory and biosafety guidelines.
The WSLH is a national leader for our work in building and maintaining collaborative networks with Wisconsin’s 130+ hospital and clinical sentinel laboratories.
Warshauer, deputy director of the WSLH Communicable Disease Division, received the Silver Award, which honors a laboratorian with roughly 10 to 15 years of service in a governmental public health laboratory who is recognized as a leader both within their home laboratory as well as external to their laboratory.
Warshauer is an active member of APHL’s infectious disease committee, biosafety and biosecurity committee, chairman of the tuberculosis (TB) subcommittee, and a frequent collaborator with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scientists. He also has served on CDC workgroups to develop recommendations and guidelines for the use of laboratory tests to aid in the diagnosis of TB.
Both Bowles and Warshauer worked in hospital and clinical laboratories in Wisconsin before joining the WSLH.