Literary Honors

Professor Vincent Tam Earns ASHP Foundation Literature Award for Sustained Contributions

December 11 — UH College of Pharmacy Professor Vincent H. Tam, Pharm.D., BCPS (AQ-ID), FIDSA, has been recognized with the 2019 American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Foundation Literature Award for Sustained Contributions. 

Presented to Tam Dec. 10 during the ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting in Las Vegas, Nev., the award "recognizes a pharmacist with a 20-year record of publishing high quality and impactful peer-reviewed biomedical literature." 

"This is a great honor to be able to be recognized for the work that I’ve put in, but I also see this as a team award; this is a recognition of my institution environment, my collaborators, my research staff, my trainees, and my students," Tam said.   

Tam is a highly respected researcher and clinical pharmacy specialist in the field of infectious diseases, especially multidrug resistant infections.  

He has authored/coauthored more than 160 papers in peer-reviewed journals since 2001, including a May 2014 paper published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy that was recognized as the Pharmacotherapy Paper of the Year Award by the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists (SIDP).

He also served as coauthor of the recently published "International Consensus Guidelines for the Optimal Use of the Polymyxins" in the journal Pharmacotherapy, with the endorsement of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, Infectious Diseases Society of America, International Society for Anti‐infective Pharmacology, Society of Critical Care Medicine and Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists.

Over the course of his career, Tam has received research support from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, nonprofit associations and foundations, and companies within the pharmaceutical industry. Tam also is co-inventor on U.S. patents for novel formulations for the last-resort drug polymyxin B and a novel rapid diagnostic system to help guide rational dosing of antimicrobials at the bedside.

A past member of the SIDP Board of Directors, Tam also was the first pharmacist elected to serve on the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases' Board of Directors. His other honors include the University of Houston Excellence in Research and Scholarship Award in 2008 and as a member of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Best Practices Award-winning team at the St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital (now CHI St. Luke's Baylor Medical Center) Center for Antimicrobial Stewardship and Epidemiology in 2010. Last year, Tam was inducted as a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.