The award-winning research
“Honoured, humbled and feel a little bit of a fraud,” says Dr. Duleeka Knipe when asked about her most recent De Leo Fund award by the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP).
Her simple explanation is: “The work I’m being recognized for is not my work alone but the work of a large collaboration of people in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. I have them to thank for my awards and I feel fortunate to be part of this hugely supportive and inspiring team.”
The De Leo Fund Award honours the memory of Nicola and Vittorio, children of Prof. Diego De Leo, an IASP Past President.
Dr. Knipe’s research has focused on achieving a better understanding of suicidal behaviour in low- and middle-income countries, where 79 per cent of the world’s suicide deaths occur but which attract only a fraction of mental health research funding.
Her interest had been triggered when she was appointed research co-ordinator on the world’s largest randomised trial in suicide prevention initiative – a cluster randomised trial of lockable storage devices for pesticides in rural Sri Lanka with 165,000 individuals.
She managed the baseline survey and designed all the study databases. This work and her work on investigating the impact of public health interventions (national pesticide bans) have contributed significantly to understanding the most effective method of suicide prevention in these countries. Her pesticide regulation work is currently being used by the World Health Organization (WHO) and policymakers in these countries.
In Sri Lanka, Dr. Knipe works with the South Asian Clinical Toxicology Research Collaboration at Peradeniya University.
An earlier award also by the IASP presented to Dr. Knipe was for the most promising early career researcher.