Dr. Jean “Bill” Pape presented the award to Dr. Warren Johnson, “It is with immense joy that I am celebrating with you Warren’s 60 years of service to Weill Cornell and 40 years of dedication to GHESKIO Centers in Haiti, the institution we created together and built under his careful and continued guidance.”

Dr. Warren Johnson had been a mentor to Dr. Pape in medical school and, in 1979, began working with the GHESKIO team on understanding the etiology of infantile diarrhea. Introducing oral rehydration therapy decreased infantile deaths by two-thirds.

This began Dr. Johnsons’s 40-year mentoring and collaboration with GHESKIO in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Dr. Johnson has been one of the authors of over 100 journal articles with GHESKIO, including the seminal “Outcomes after antiretroviral therapy during the expansion of HIV services in Haiti” and the first description in a developing country (NEJM) of what would later turn out to be AIDS.

Starting with two people in 1979 (Dr. Pape and Dr. Johnson) Dr. Johnsons’s contribution to GHESKIO and the people of Haiti over the past 40 years is immeasurable.