Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Imaging, Eylem Levelt has won the ‘Escalator Award’ given to the most successful women physician of the year by the ‘Women As One’, a nonprofit organization fighting gender inequalities in medicine by providing talented women physicians with unique professional opportunities.
The first physician from Turkey to win the ‘Escalator Award’, Eylem Levelt said that with the responsibility of the award, she aims to support female cardiologists of future generations.
Women as One was founded in 2019 by Dr. Roxana Mehran & Dr. Marie-Claude Morice, two internationally recognized leaders in cardiovascular care and research. Their mission is to promote talent in medicine, providing women physicians with unique professional opportunities. The Escalator Awards aim to fortify the pipeline of women leaders by ‘escalating’ a highly qualified group of women cardiologists through targeted funding, mentorship and networking.
Drawing attention to the gender inequality in the field of medicine, Levelt says, “More than 50 percent of the applicants to medical faculties are women, while those who reach the professorship and department heads are predominantly men.”
Levelt also added that physicians in Turkey are going through difficult times and that the brain drain has increased because of this: “To tell the truth, when I think about the working conditions in Turkey, I weep for physician friends.”
Eylem Levelt, DPhil (Oxon) MBBS MRCP FHEA, Wellcome Trust Clinical Career Development Fellow and Associate Professor in Cardiology at the University of Leeds (United Kingdom), is an academic cardiologist with a special interest in cardiac metabolism and advanced cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging techniques including spectroscopy, perfusion imaging, and oxygen-sensitive imaging.
You can find more information about her work here.