Purdue Alumni of San Francisco: Boilermaker Founders Forum - Purdue University

The 2026 Faculty of Science Alumni Achievement Award ceremony returned to celebrate the outstanding impact of 8 accomplished Science alumni. Each year, the awards showcase the wide variety of paths our alumni take following their degree in Science, and reminded attendees of the potential for science to transform our world. Congratulations to all of our 2026 award recipients: Dr. Emily Pass (BSc ’19), Colleen Doyle (BSc ’10, MSc’14), Peter Lowe (BSc’88), Sam DiLoreto (BSc ’93), Brenda DiLoreto (BSc ’93), Joe Han (BSc’06), Dr. Robert Britton (BSc ’96) and Dr. Karen Maxwell (BSc ’95). The 2026 Faculty of Science ceremony was held on Monday, October 5 in Federation Hall, with our award recipients and their supporters in attendance, alongside faculty and staff members from Science. This year’s ceremony celebrated and recognized the contributions each award recipient has made on their respective communities, the field of science and the reputation of the University of Waterloo.

Ever since Steven Deeks began treating HIV and AIDS patients at San Francisco General Hospital in 1993, he was drawn into their community and became especially interested in those whose illness didn’t behave as expected. Why did some deteriorate more slowly than others? Was their virus different, or was there something unusual about their immune systems? More than three decades later, Deeks is one of the field’s leading researchers and still sees patients at San Francisco General’s Ward 86, one of the world’s leading AIDS clinics. In that time, AIDS has killed more than 40 million people worldwide, even as HIV medicine has been transformed. Deeks watched combination antiretroviral therapy turn a routinely fatal infection into a manageable chronic disease, and prevention drugs make it possible to stop infections before and after exposure. But antiretroviral drugs suppress HIV rather than eliminate it. Stop treatment, and the virus almost always returns. That has kept alive the question those early patients first prompted for Deeks: Can the immune system itself be trained to control HIV? Now Deeks and his colleagues have evidence that it can.