Professor Stephen Chambers received the CNZM for services to infectious diseases research in the 2021 New Year Honours.
Professor Chambers founded and developed The Infection Group, a collaboration between the University of Otago, Christchurch and the Canterbury District Health Board that is now a leading infectious diseases clinical research team in New Zealand and a world leader in research on certain diseases.
He is also the MB ChB convenor of Microbiology at the UOC campus.
Professor Chambers established the Infectious Diseases Department at Christchurch Hospital in 1987, the first such service in New Zealand outside of Auckland, and he remained Clinical Director until 2015. For more than a decade he was the only infectious diseases physician in the South Island.