HIV/AIDS experts awarded over $5M to foster health and medical research skills in India, Africa

Experts in HIV/AIDS at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine and the university's Bloomberg School of Public Health have been awarded more than $5 million by the Fogarty International Center's HIV Research Training Program to foster health and medical research skills in India, Uganda, Ethiopia and Malawi. The training funds, to be spread over five years, focus on places hard hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, currently estimated to infect some 33.4 million people worldwide.

Four Johns Hopkins awards were among 22 grants announced in October 2013 by Fogarty, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The new funding will be used to train more than 50 undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral research scientists, as well as lab technologists, as part of a broader effort to develop and upgrade the health and medical research infrastructure in these countries, Fogarty officials say.

Such added local skills, researchers say, are essential to the success of many other U.S. government-funded HIV/AIDS initiatives aimed at preventing and treating people with the disease.

The awards are supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, all parts of the NIH. Among the Johns Hopkins faculty serving as principal investigators of the awards are:

• Robert Bollinger, M.D., M.P.H.
HIV-TB Fogarty Research Training Program (India) http://www.hopkinsglobalhealth.org/researchers/profile/
746/Bollinger/Robert

• Ronald Gray, M.D.
Male Circumcision and Use of Foreskin Tissues for HIV Prevention in Uganda http://www.hopkinsglobalhealth.org/researchers/profile/
928/Gray/Ronald

• Andrea Ruff, M.D.
Optimizing HIV Prevention in Ethiopia through Implementation Science http://www.hopkinsglobalhealth.org/researchers/profile/
1077/Ruff/Andrea

• Taha Taha, M.B.B.S., Ph.D.
Training in HIV-related Non-communicable Disease Complications in Malawi http://www.hopkinsglobalhealth.org/researchers/profile/
1126/Taha/Taha_E._

"These training grants are desperately needed to assemble the critical mass of medical research personnel necessary to plan, organize, implement and monitor how we battle HIV disease in the countries most heavily burdened by the pandemic," says Fogarty grant recipient Robert Bollinger, a professor at Johns Hopkins and director of its Center for Clinical Global Health Education.