The Carolina Antimicrobial Stewardship Program (CASP) honored three collaborators with Super Steward Awards. The award recipients were Jenny Boyd, MD; Joseph Stromberg, MD; and David J. Weber, MD, MPH. CASP created the awards in 2022 to recognize colleagues’ efforts to champion stewardship in their settings. 
“CASP’s success hinges on collaboration with colleagues passionate about stewardship. Careful use of antimicrobials and diagnostics is a habit and something they nurture in others. We want to celebrate these individuals with the Super Steward awards,” said Nikolaos Mavrogiorgos, MD, CASP medical director. He, along with Lindsay Daniels, PharmD, CASP pharmacy lead, and Zachary Willis, MD, MPH, CASP pediatric director, recognized the third cohort of awardees in May.
Dr. Jenny Boyd, the medical director of the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at UNC Children’s, leads quality improvement projects that include reducing hospital-acquired infections such as CLABSI, CAUTI, and VAP and standardizing clinical pathways in the PICU.
Boyd has been an enthusiastic champion for several CASP initiatives over the years, which has ensured the success of those projects. She recently championed CASP’s quality improvement initiative to reduce unnecessary respiratory cultures in PICU patients. The project could not have been completed without PICU leadership engagement, and Boyd went above and beyond. She played a significant role in setting the overall strategy and approach in the design phase. She repeatedly boosted the project’s profile and helped innovate and adjust CASP’s approach as needed. That support has been ongoing, and the project has continued success from late 2021 through 2022. Over the past year, she has mentored PICU fellows focused on the prevention and diagnostic stewardship of catheter-associated urinary tract infections.
Dr. Joseph Stromberg is a third-year resident in Internal Medicine. He has supported CASP this past year in several endeavors, such as Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus PCR testing, on which he presented a poster at ID Week 2023.
He demonstrated leadership through CASP’s Handshake Stewardship pilot project, in which he played a central role: performing a literature review and making recommendations to the stewardship team; helping design, plan, and develop the project; and project implementation and monitoring. He is the lead data analyst, and pilot results will inform CASP’s direction in the coming year. This stewardship project would not exist without Dr. Stromberg’s contributions. He is also the resident representative in hospital-wide CASP stakeholder meetings.
Our final honoree, Dr. David J. Weber, is a long-time, avid steward, consistently working to educate others on appropriate ordering and testing. He has been instrumental in the creation of the stewardship program. He has actively participated in stewardship strategies and planning, selflessly lending his time and extensive expertise in infectious diseases/infection prevention and stewardship. Weber has also been an excellent resource for developing quality improvement and research projects as Medical Director of UNC Hospitals’ Department of Infection Prevention and through his active role in the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), currently as President-elect. He routinely provides input on clinical guideline development and opens doors for disseminating best practices across the Medical Center. Since 2022, Weber has actively introduced and sustained a hard stop in Epic for ordering guideline-non-compliant C. difficile tests by following up with providers individually as needed.
CASP congratulates the honorees and thanks all those who submitted nominations.
Read about previous winners.