The Dr. Thomas A. Dooley Award - 2015: Rev. Thomas Streit, C.S.C., ’80, ’85 M.Div., ’94 Ph.D.

2015: Rev. Thomas Streit, C.S.C., ’80, ’85 M.Div., ’94 Ph.D.

For his tireless efforts in the fight against lymphatic filariasis (LF), the cause of elephantiasis and a leading cause of disability worldwide, Rev. Thomas Streit, C.S.C., ’80, ’85 M.Div., ’94 Ph.D. is presented with the 2015 Dr. Thomas A. Dooley Award.

Father Streit was ordained a Holy Cross priest in 1986. In 1994, he earned his doctorate from Notre Dame in vector biology and arbovirology. He has served as a member of Notre Dame’s faculty since 1997. 

Founder of Notre Dame’s Haiti Program, Father Streit has been working there since 1993, studying the transmission of the exotic parasite Wuchereria bancrofti, which causes LF. Following the World Health Assembly’s placement of LF on a shortlist of diseases slated for elimination, in 1999 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded its first LF grant to Father Streit to help a collaborative group including the Haitian government, Holy Cross Hospital, and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention build capacity for, and study the efficacy of, various elimination strategies for LF in Haiti. The steps involved in eliminating LF as a public health problem are varied and multidisciplinary; efforts have focused on the development of an infrastructure and the technical capacity to stop transmission by 2020.  

He also has been involved in Haiti and the Dominican Republic on work regarding transmission and the epidemiology of malaria, dengue and Chikungunya viruses, leprosy, and Helicobacter pylori gastritis.

“The Dooley award has always meant much to me not just because of the great hero in whose honor it is named and the lore of its recipients, but because it is awarded by the Alumni Association of Our Lady’s University!” Father Streit said. “For me, to be acknowledged in this way is tremendously encouraging for the work that so many alums are doing in Haiti. That I was the one that planted the UND flag there two decades ago is incidental to that hundreds of folks are supporting the poor one way or another.”