Alumni

AIDS @ 30: Recent Achievements and Future Challenges
3rd Annual Alumni Summit for Public Health Leadership
The Italian Academy, Columbia University’s Morningside Campus
June 16, 2011, 5:00pm

Reunite. Reconnect. Revisit. Register.

Description:
Every nine and a half minutes someone in the U.S. is being infected with HIV, reports the CDC. There are an estimated 7,000 new infections every day globally. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. The panel discussion will explore the latest medical breakthroughs and achievements in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The panel will focus on how education and scaled up prevention can help stop the spread of this disease both here in the U.S. and around the world.

Remarks:
Linda P. Fried, MD, MPH, Dean and DeLamar Professor of Public Health Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

Moderator:
Ariel Pablos-Mendez, MD, MPH '92, Managing Director, The Rockefeller Foundation;
Nominated for Assistant Administrator for Global Health, USAID
Ariel Pablos-Méndez is a creative leader in global health who initiated his career in 1990 working on multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in New York City and later on at the World Health Organization. He joined The Rockefeller Foundation in 1998, spearheading public-private partnerships in R&D for diseases of poverty, the Foundation's strategy on AIDS care in Africa, and the Joint Learning Initiative on Human Resources for Health. He then served as Director of Knowledge Management at the World Health Organization in Geneva, from 2004 to 2007, working to bridge the know-do gap in public health and promoting global e-Health.  In 2007, Dr. Pablos-Méndez returned as Managing Director to the Rockefeller Foundation, where he has repositioned The Foundation’s global health strategy towards the transformation of health systems for universal coverage.  He attended medical school at the University of Guadalajara (Mexico) and obtained his MPH degree from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, where he is a Professor of Clinical Medicine and Epidemiology.

Panelists:
Quarraisha Abdool Karim, PhD, MS '89, Associate Professor of Clinical Epidemiology; Associate Director of the Centre for AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA)
Quarraisha Abdool Karim, PhD, is an infectious diseases epidemiologist whose main current research interests are in understanding the evolving HIV epidemic in South Africa; factors influencing acquisition of HIV infection in adolescent girls; reducing women’s vulnerability to HIV infection, ethical challenges in the conduct of HIV/AIDS research and sustainable strategies to introduce HAART in resource-constrained settings.

Dr. Abdool Karim is an Associate Professor in Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. In addition she is the Director of the Columbia University - Southern African Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program and is an Associate Scientific Director of CAPRISA. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in Public Health at the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine at University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is Co-Principal Investigator of the HPTN Leadership Group (a US National Institute for Health clinical trial network that focuses on testing new HIV Prevention interventions.  She serves on several boards including the AIDS Law Project, Academic Alliance and the Tibotec Global Advisory Group. She serves as a consultant to WHO, UNAIDS and UNDP on several HIV/AIDS related expert committees in relation to gender, ethics, vaccines, treatment and research capacity building. In addition to almost two decades of HIV prevention research experience, she has extensive policy and programmatic experience that stems from her term as the first National Director of the South African National HIV/AIDS and STD Program that was established shortly after the first democratic elections.

Salim S. Abdool Karim, MD, PhD, MS '89, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology; Director of the Centre for AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA)
Salim S. Abdool Karim, MBChB, PhD is a clinical infectious diseases epidemiologist whose main current research interests are in microbicides and vaccines to prevent HIV infection and implementing antiretroviral therapy in resource constrained settings. He is Pro Vice- Chancellor (Research) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. He is also Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. He is Director of CAPRISA - Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa.

Dr. Abdool Karim is Principal Investigator of clinical trials assessing the effectiveness of microbicides, HIV vaccines and strategies for integrating antiretroviral therapy into TB treatment services. He is co-inventor on two patents which have been included in candidate HIV vaccines. He has published widely on infectious diseases, including AIDS, measles and hepatitis B and co-edited the textbook that is widely used to teach epidemiology in South Africa as well as a book on HIV/AIDS in South Africa.
He is Associate Editor of AIDS Clinical Care and Editorial Board member of Sexually Transmitted Infection, the Southern African Journal of HIV Medicine and Southern African Journal of Epidemiology and Infection.  He is Co-Chair of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Group for Reproductive Health at the World Health Organization and a Member of the UNAIDS Prevention Reference Group. He is a Steering Committee member of the Gate's Foundation's Global HIV Prevention Working Group and an Executive Committee Member of the NIH funded Microbicide Trials Network. He is a member of the Academy of Science in South Africa and a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa.

Wafaa El-Sadr, MD, MPH '91, Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine; Director, International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs (ICAP) at Columbia University
Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr's activities focus on various aspects of the HIV and tuberculosis epidemics domestically and globally. She led the development of several international programs focused on development of HIV care and treatment programs in several resource-limited countries. Her focus has been the development of programs that address the needs of adults and children by using a family-focused model of care provided by well-trained multidisciplinary teams of providers. Dr. El-Sadr has also championed the establishment of care programs that integrate the management of tuberculosis in HIV care programs. Dr. El-Sadr's has focused on both domestic as well as international issues related to HIV and tuberculosis. The programs she established at Harlem Hospital Center in New York City have informed her international efforts. Dr. El-Sadr has extensive research experience. She has received funding from National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other organizations and foundations. Her research work has focused on identification of strategies for management of HIV disease and for the prevention and treatment of tuberculosis. She is a founding member of the NIH-funded Community Programs for Clinical Research on AIDS (CPCRA), a research network committed to providing access to research to underrepresented populations. She leads a unit of the NIH-funded HIV Prevention trials network where her work has focused on microbicide research. She is also an established researcher for the CDC-funded Tuberculosis Treatment Consortium and the Tuberculosis Epidemiologic Studies Consortium. Dr. El-Sadr has authored many articles in professional journals and serves on numerous professional committees.

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For questions, please contact the Office of Alumni Affairs at (212) 305-4797 or e-mail msphalum@columbia.edu.