Left to right Environmental Tectonics Corporation representative (award sponsor), Associate Professor Rob Griffiths and Aerospace Medical Association (AsMA) President Dr Rob Orford at the AsMA Annual Scientific Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, on 5 June.
Associate Professor Rob Griffiths, the Director of the Occupational and Aviation Medicine Unit on the Pōneke campus, has won the 2025 John Ernsting Award from the US-based Aerospace Medical Association (AsMA).
The prestigious award is presented by the association annually for longstanding exceptional performance in the education, development, and administration of aerospace medicine and related specialties.
It recognises Rob’s achievements in setting up the Occupational and Aviation Medicine programme as part of the Department of Medicine in 1987. Under his leadership, it has become the leading civil aviation medicine distance teaching programme in the world, providing international distance teaching and research supervision to students in aviation medicine, occupational medicine and aeromedical retrieval and transport. The unit employs a virtual team of academic staff based in North America, the Middle East, Europe and Australasia and has awarded 900 degrees and graduated 640 students since its foundation.
Rob has an honours degree in medicine from the University of Bristol in the UK and is a former pilot in the Royal Air Force (RAF).
He is “over the moon” to have won the award, which is named in memory of his mentor, the late Professor John Ernsting, a former RAF commander, researcher, and Professor of Aviation Medicine at King’s College, London.
“John created the opportunity for the career that I followed. He was the grandfather of aviation medicine in the UK, with the various editions of Ernsting’s Aviation Medicine used as course texts for our programme.
“He was also my mentor. He enabled me to take the Diploma in Aviation Medicine (DAvMed), now run as a joint programme between King’s and RAF Henlow, as an external student, almost unheard of at that time.
“This changed the course of my career and life.”
Rob went on to win the Stewart Memorial Prize for best DAvMed student that year.
He has fond memories of meeting John for the last time at an Otago Occupational and Aviation Medicine Residential School at Stirling Castle in Scotland in 2009, just four days before John died suddenly in his lab.
“I was able to present him with a large model Concorde from the aviation museum, reflecting his contribution to oxygen systems for high-altitude supersonic flights.
“I was also able to tell him what a huge influence he had been on my life and career, and how grateful I was.
“I have always tried to emulate his modesty and empathy for students, although I could never be as clever. This is a huge honour for me and a tribute to a truly inspiring and brilliant scientist.”
Rob was presented with the award at the AsMA Annual Scientific Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States, on 5 June.
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