Professor Richard Beasley has been awarded this year’s TSANZ research medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to respiratory research and medicine.

His work on beta-agonists and mortality and the impactful nature of that research was why Richard was selected from the list of three researchers put forward for the award this year said Matthew Peters who presented the award.

“It’s a great honour to stand before you today to accept the research medal and I feel really humbled thinking of the eminent scientists and colleagues who have received the medal before me,” Beasley told the conference.

After giving the audience a taster of  his research conducted over several decades Beasley rounded of his talk by urging his colleagues to “challenge dogma and think outside the box”.

“We are aware of the very limited evidence base by which we practice medicine…I think we need to be more assertive in challenging dogma,” he said.

“We all know that there are a lot of things that we do that don’t have a lot of evidence base across a whole range of our clinical practice,” he said.

“Because at the end of the day we are advocates for our patients.”

Professor Beasley is based at the University of Otago in New Zealand and is the Director of the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand.