Appendix
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members
Paul A. Volberding, M.D. (Chair), is a professor in the Department of Medicine and Director of the AIDS Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is also co-director of the UCSF-GIVI Center for AIDS Research and Director of Research, Global Health Sciences, at UCSF. Dr. Volberding received his medical degree from the University of Minnesota and finished training at the University of Utah and UCSF, where he studied for 2 years as a research fellow in the virology laboratory of Dr. Jay Levy, later a co-discoverer of HIV. Dr. Volberding’s professional activities initially centered at San Francisco General Hospital where he established a model program of AIDS patient care, research, and professional education. His research career began with investigations of HIV-related malignancies, especially Kaposi’s sarcoma. His primary research focus, however, shifted to clinical trials of antiretroviral drugs. He was instrumental in testing many compounds but is best known for groundbreaking trials establishing the benefit of treatment in early stage HIV infection. Dr. Volberding has written many research and review articles. He is coeditor in chief of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes and is the founder and chair of the board of the International AIDS Society-USA and a past president of the International AIDS Society (IDSA). He was president of the HIV Medicine Association of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American College of Physicians, and of IDSA, and he is a member of the Institute of Medicine, where he has served on several committees addressing the HIV epidemic.
Angela A. Aidala, Ph.D., is an associate research scientist at the Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences. Her primary interest is the intersection of economic, social, and cultural influences on health and illness among disadvantaged populations. Dr. Aidala’s work focuses on research, teaching, and service delivery strategies to work effectively with harder–to–reach or “hidden” populations in urban settings, including the homeless, mentally ill, substance users, HIV–infected adults, and youth. Dr. Aidala has directed more than 20 collaborative community health or services research projects. Her recent work is studying housing/lack of housing and HIV prevention and care and methodological and statistical approaches to improve “practice-based” evidence. Dr. Aidala is coprincipal director and study director of the Community Health Advisory & Information Network (CHAIN), an ongoing study of persons living with HIV or at high risk of infection in New York City, now in its eighteenth year. CHAIN is conducted in collaboration with the HIV Planning Council and the New York Health Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and is a main source of data for service planning in the region. Formerly she directed the Multiple Diagnoses Initiative, a Department of Housing and Urban Development–Department of Health and Human Services joint initiative that worked with housing providers to better understand the reciprocal relationship between housing and health care among persons living with HIV/AIDS who also struggle with mental illness and/or chronic substance abuse problems. Dr. Aidala received her Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University.
David D. Celentano, Sc.D., M.H.S., is professor and Charles Armstrong Chair of the Department of Epidemiology in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with joint appointments in medicine; international health; and health, society, and behavior. His research integrates behavioral science theory and research with epidemiologic methods in the study of behavioral and social epidemiology. Although originally trained in a chronic disease paradigm (alcoholism and cancer control), he began his research in HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the early 1980s. He has worked on some of the major cohort studies (AIDS Link to the Intravenous Experience [ALIVE], Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study [MACS]) in HIV epidemiology, as well as conducted intervention research in the United States for heterosexual men and women, injection drug users, and young men who have sex with men. He began international HIV research in 1990 through a long-term collaboration with Chiang Mai University in northern Thailand. He has worked on and directed numerous HIV/AIDS and STD epidemiological investigations and preventive interventions. He and his collaborators demonstrated that a behavioral intervention with young military conscripts led to a sevenfold reduction in incident STDs and halved the
HIV incidence rate. In addition, the role of STDs and alcohol use in HIV acquisition has been shown. His research group conducted a prospective study of hormonal contraception in relation to HIV seroconversion and elucidated the epidemiology of human papillomavirus prevalence, incidence, and clearance—a study with significant family planning policy and health implications. Today, he is the principal investigator of four studies in Thailand supported by the National Institutes of Health, focusing on interventions to influence the association between drug use, sexual risk, and HIV treatment in HIV transmission. Additional research is being conducted in Vietnam, India, South Africa, and Tanzania.
Moupali Das, M.D., M.P.H., is director of research in the HIV Prevention Section at the San Francisco Department of Public Health and assistant clinical professor in the Divisions of Infectious Diseases and HIV/AIDS at San Francisco General Hospital, at the University of California, San Francisco. She is a board-certified infectious disease clinician-HIV specialist with research expertise in implementation science and evaluation research, in particular, using routinely collected HIV surveillance data to evaluate the impact of a comprehensive public health approach to HIV, including multilevel HIV prevention interventions. Dr. Das coauthored a key modeling study using San Francisco’s surveillance data to evaluate the effect of expanding access to antiretroviral therapy on the HIV epidemic among MSM. She has developed a novel population-based biologic indicator, community viral load, for monitoring the HIV epidemic prevention and control. Her manuscript on community viral load (Das, PLOS One 2010) has been cited as the basis for measuring community viral load in President Barack Obama’s National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS) and provides the framework for the NHAS recommendation that community viral load be used as an outcome measure to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy. Dr. Das has examined geographic and sociodemographic disparities in community viral load as well as the relationship between community viral load and new HIV infections. She is evaluating the relationship between differences in community viral load among different subpopulations in San Francisco and corresponding disparities in HIV incidence. Dr. Das is currently refining the community viral load methodology and exploring using community viral load as a marker for multiple planned multilevel HIV prevention trials. Dr. Das has been honored by invitations to participate in the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Management and Budget consultations on developing a parsimonious set of harmonized indicators to evaluate the impact of the NHAS and health care reform. Dr. Das has been privileged to mentor junior investigators to support publication of their manuscripts on community viral load (Castel, AIDS 2011).
Victor G. DeGruttola, Sc.D., M.S., is a professor of biostatistics and chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. His research activities focus on developments of statistical methods required for appropriate public health response to the AIDS epidemic both within the United States and internationally. The aspects of the epidemic on which he has worked include transmission of, and natural history of infection with, HIV, as well as research on antiretroviral treatments, including the development and consequences of resistance and other adverse consequences of treatments. The broad goals of his research include developing treatment strategies that provide tolerable and durable virologic suppression while preserving treatment options after failure and evaluating the community-level impact of packages of prevention interventions, including antiviral treatment itself. He served as the director of the Statistics and Data Analysis Center of the Adult Project of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group during the period in which highly active antiretroviral treatment was developed, and he was instrumental in designing and analyzing studies of the best means of providing such therapy. Most recently, he has been engaged in development and application of methods for prevention of HIV infection.
Carlos del Rio, M.D., is the Hubert Professor and Chair of the Hubert Department of Global Health at the Rollins School of Public Health and professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Emory University School of Medicine. He is also codirector of the Emory Center for AIDS Research. He has held numerous leadership roles including executive director of the National AIDS Council of Mexico, the federal agency of the Mexican government responsible for AIDS policy in that country; program director and principal investigator of the Emory AIDS International Training and Research Program; and member of the Board of the International AIDS Society–USA, the HIV Medicine Association, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Dr. del Rio’s research interests include the epidemiology of opportunistic infections in HIV and other immune deficiencies, the epidemiology and transmission dynamics of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, HIV testing, access to and retention in care, and compliance with antiretroviral drug regimens. He is also interested in the impact of HIV in developing countries and the optimal use of antiretroviral drugs in limited-resource settings. Dr. del Rio is associate editor of AIDS Clinical Care and senior clinical editor for AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses and is a member of the editorial board of Journal of AIDS and Global Public Health. He has coauthored more than 150 scientific papers.
Marshall Forstein, M.D., is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of Adult Psychiatry Residency Training at the
Cambridge Health Alliance. He attended the College of Medicine, University of Vermont, after a career of teaching high school English, where he developed a lifelong interest in teaching and education. He completed an internship at Presbyterian Hospital, Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, and a residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. For 12 years he served as Medical Director of Mental Health and Addiction Services of the Fenway Community Health Center in Boston, a dedicated center for the care of sexual minorities and people at risk for and living with HIV infection. Dr. Forstein teaches medical students and is a core faculty member in the Division of Palliative Care at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Forstein has been treating people with HIV since the beginning of the epidemic, and he cofounded an integrated medical/psychiatric HIV clinic that has been treating a diverse population of people infected with HIV for more than 25 years. He served as a member of the board of directors of the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts. Dr. Forstein has been a principal investigator on an HIV Education and Training Grant through the federal Center for Mental Health Services and later served as a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Mental Health Services of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration. He teaches and has published on the neuropsychiatry and psychosocial aspects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He currently chairs the Steering Committee on HIV Psychiatry for the American Psychiatric Association for Research and Education. He is a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and is currently serving on the Residency Review Committee for Psychiatry of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.
Carmine Grasso, M.S.W., M.P.H., is currently a consultant working on HIV policy and funding issues. He recently retired from public service from the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services where he served as Director of the Care and Treatment Unit, which oversees the development of integrated systems designed to address the care and treatment needs of persons living with HIV in New Jersey. This unit serves as the Ryan White Part B grantee in New Jersey and oversees CARE Act activities, which include the AIDS Drug Distribution Program, the HIV Home Care Program, the Health Insurance Continuation Program, and regional HIV Care Services. Mr. Grasso has served as a consultant for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Global AIDS Program and the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors. From 1979 to 1981, Mr. Grasso served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Kiribati, where he worked as an outer island health education and sanitation worker in a primary health care program sponsored by the World Health Organization. Mr. Grasso received his M.P.H. and M.S.W. degrees from Columbia University.
Shannon Houser, Ph.D., M.P.H., RHIA, is an associate professor in the Health Information Management Program in the Department of Health Services Administration, School of Health Professions of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Dr. Houser works on many research studies at UAB, mostly large national studies of epidemiology, health behavior, health information technology, data management, and program evaluation. She brings her expertise in health information management, the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule, and electronic health record implementation and evaluation. She has published widely in professional journals. Dr. Houser has been appointed as an adviser to Project HOPE and provides technical advice on program monitoring and evaluation for most ongoing HOPE-sponsored projects in China. Dr. Houser serves as a member of the American Health Information Management Association’s Education Strategy Committee and Research Committee and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s Scholarship Committee and Electronic Health Record Usability Task Force. She has served on the editorial review board and is currently a reviewer of the journal Perspectives in Health Information Management. Dr. Houser also develops courses and teaches in the undergraduate and graduate Health Information Management Programs for both traditional classroom courses and online or distance learning courses.
Jennifer Kates, Ph.D., M.A., M.P.A., is vice president and director of Global Health & HIV Policy at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), where she oversees the foundation’s policy analysis and research focused on the U.S. government’s role in global health and on the global and domestic HIV epidemics. Widely regarded as an expert in the field, she regularly publishes and presents on global health issues and is particularly known for her work on analyzing donor government investments in global health; assessing and mapping the U.S. government’s global health architecture, programs, and funding; and tracking key trends in the HIV epidemic, an area in which she has been working for more than 20 years. Prior to joining KFF in 1998, Dr. Kates was a senior associate with the Lewin Group, a health care consulting firm, where she focused on HIV policy, strategic planning and health systems analysis, and health care for vulnerable populations. Before that, she directed the Office of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Concerns at Princeton University. Dr. Kates also serves on numerous federal and private sector advisory committees on global health and HIV/AIDS issues. She is a former member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Planning the Evaluation of Global HIV/AIDS Programs Implemented Under the U.S. Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008, as well as the IOM Committee on HIV Screening and Access to Care. Dr. Kates received her Ph.D. in health
policy from the George Washington University, where she is also a lecturer. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College, a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a master’s degree in political science from the University of Massachusetts.
Erika G. Martin, Ph.D., M.P.H., is an assistant professor of public administration and policy at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy and an institute fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, State University of New York at Albany. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on policy analysis methods and health policy. Dr. Martin has examined the fairness and flexibility of the federal allocation formula for the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, interstate variation in state AIDS Drug Assistance Program formularies, and the budget impact of expanded HIV screening on government testing, discretionary, and entitlement programs. Current projects include using system dynamics modeling to evaluate the new HIV testing law in New York State, analyzing the effects of the recently repealed ban on federal funding for syringe exchange programs, and assessing how health reform may affect AIDS Drug Assistance Programs. In addition to her research on HIV and substance abuse policy, Dr. Martin is actively involved in various projects that examine the public health effects of state vaccination laws and the way media influence public policy and public health practice. Dr. Martin received her B.A. from Brown University, her M.P.H. in epidemiology from the University of Michigan, and her Ph.D. in health policy and administration from Yale University.
Kenneth H. Mayer, M.D., is the director of HIV Prevention Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a visiting professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Previously, Dr. Mayer was professor of medicine and community health and director of the AIDS Program at Brown University and an attending infectious disease physician at Miriam Hospital. He is medical research director at Fenway Community Health in Boston and codirector of the Fenway Institute. Dr. Mayer has conducted studies of HIV’s natural history and interventions to interrupt transmission since the beginning of the epidemic. He was one of the first clinical researchers in New England to care for patients living with AIDS. Dr. Mayer has lectured at many international conferences and symposia on biological and behavioral approaches to HIV prevention research and the development of community-based clinical research. He coedited The Emergence of AIDS: Impact on Immunology, Microbiology, and Public Health (APHA Press); HIV Prevention: A Comprehensive Approach (Academic Press); and The Fenway Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Health (ACP
Press). He has served as a member of the Data and Safety Monitoring Board of NIH’s AIDS Clinical Trials Group and sits on several editorial boards of scientific publications. Dr. Mayer has co-authored more than 450 articles, chapters, and other publications on AIDS and related infectious disease topics.
Vickie M. Mays, Ph.D., M.S.P.H., is a professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of Letters and Sciences, as well as a professor in the Department of Health Services at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Public Health. She is also the director of the UCLA Center on Research, Education, Training and Strategic Communication on Minority Health Disparities. She teaches courses on health status and health behaviors of racial and ethnic minority groups; research ethics in biomedical and behavioral research on racial and ethnic minority populations; research methods in minority research; mental health policy and mental health services; and the social determinants of mental disorders and psychopathology. She holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and an M.S.P.H. in health services, with postdoctoral training in psychiatric epidemiology, survey research as it applies to ethnic minorities (University of Michigan), and health policy (RAND). Professor Mays’s research focuses on the mental and physical health disparities affecting racial and ethnic minority populations. She has a long history of research and policy development in the area of contextual factors surrounding HIV/AIDS in racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. This work ranges from looking at barriers to education and services to understanding racially based immunological differences that may contribute to disparities in health outcomes. Other areas of research include looking at the role of perceived and actual discrimination in mental and physical health outcomes, particularly as these factors impact downstream disease outcomes. Her mental health research examines the availability, access, and quality of mental health services for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities and effective and efficient methods for integrating behavioral health of these populations into primary care systems. She is the co-principal investigator of the California Quality of Life Survey, a population-based study of more than 5,000 Californians on the prevalence of mental health disorders and the contextual factors associated with those disorders. Her recent work in mental health includes the provision of mental health disaster response, recovery, and preparedness as the director of a Kellogg-sponsored project in New Orleans, “Helping Hands, Healing Hearts,” which designed training for mental health providers and religious leaders. Dr. Mays has provided testimony to a number of congressional committees on her HIV, mental health, and health disparities research findings. She was chair of the Subcommittee on Populations of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics. There she helped develop a report
on the role of the collection of data on race, ethnicity, and primary language to reduce health disparities. She has received a number of awards, including one for her lifetime research on women and HIV from the American Foundation for AIDS Research, a Women and Leadership Award from the American Psychological Association, and several distinguished contributions for research awards.
David P. Pryor, M.D., M.P.H., is West Coast medical director for NBC Universal, where he oversees medical services provided to company employees, promotes the corporate–wellness agenda, and serves as a subject matter expert on legal and production-related health and safety issues. Previously, Dr. Pryor was medical director for Aetna, one of the largest health benefits companies in the United States, where he was responsible for a number of medical management activities that resulted in the coordination of quality, cost-effective care on behalf of Aetna members. He also proactively used data analysis to identify new opportunities to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of care. Prior to joining Aetna, Dr. Pryor was an associate medical director at WellPoint, where he was fortunate to have been actively involved with almost all aspects of medical management, including utilization management, medical policy, disease management, and program development. Dr. Pryor maintains a strong commitment to impacting health disparities and serves as the president and founder of BlackWomensHealth.com, one of the leading Internet sites dedicated to improving the health and wellness of African American women. Additionally, he serves on the IOM Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity and the Elimination of Health Disparities and was a featured speaker on the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Black Health Empowerment Tour. A native of California, Dr. Pryor received a B.S. in biology from Stanford University and completed his medical degree at the University of California, San Diego. He is board-certified in internal medicine and also has a master’s degree in public health from the University of California, Berkeley.
Sten H. Vermund, M.D., Ph.D., is Amos Christie Chair in Global Health and professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University and director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health. With interests in adolescence, cervical cancer prevention, and prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, he has focused on issues of special relevance to women and HIV. Dr. Vermund served as chief of the Vaccine Trials & Epidemiology Branch in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1988 to 1994 and was awarded the Superior Service Award of the U.S. Public Health Service in 1994 for his work in HIV vaccine clinical trial development. Dr. Vermund founded the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia in 2000,
now a major research venue and President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief implementer. In 2007, he founded Friends in Global Health, LLC, to spearhead HIV prevention, care, and treatment in rural Mozambique and Nigeria. He served from 2006 to 2012 as principal investigator for the HIV Prevention Trials Network, with sites in the United States, Africa, Asia, and South America. His collaboration with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention seeks to implement a “test and linkage to care” initiative for HIV-infected men who have sex with men; the dual goal is to reduce community transmission and, at the same time, improve the quality of life for HIV-infected persons. His training initiatives include the Gorgas Course in Clinical Tropical Medicine in Lima, Peru; an AIDS International Training and Research Program in Zambia, Mozambique, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China; and the Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholars and Fellows Support Center, with 472 trainees and alumni over 5 years in 45 developing-country sites doing 1-year mentored overseas research training. Dr. Vermund is co-principal investigator of the Medical Education Partnership Initiative award to the University of Zambia to build manpower capacity in HIV control. Dr. Vermund sits on U.S. and European university, WHO, U.S. Agency for International Development, and NIH advisory committees.
Adam B. Wilcox, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University and the director of clinical databases for New York Presbyterian Hospital. His primary interest is the application of health information technology in transforming the research, discovery, and delivery of health care. He currently leads a project to create a research infrastructure that incorporates data from multiple institutions and includes patient-reported data, with the goal of supporting comparative-effectiveness studies of multiple diseases. He has worked in supporting the use of data from existing clinical systems for research and manages an electronic health record at Columbia University Medical Center. He also directed the development of a community-centered health information exchange in Washington Heights, New York City, with the goal of improving care in a medically underserved immigrant population. Previously at Intermountain Healthcare and as faculty at the University of Utah, Dr. Wilcox led the design and implementation of electronic health records in the primary care and emergency department settings and was the principal investigator of a project studying the comparative effectiveness of care management in ambulatory care. He received his Ph.D. in medical informatics from Columbia University.
Douglas Wirth, M.S.W., is president and chief executive officer of AmidaCare, a nonprofit Medicaid HIV Special Needs Plan specifically designed for
persons living with HIV/AIDS that works with its members and providers to improve access to and retention in care. He is the former executive director of the People with AIDS Coalition of New York, a past chairperson of the New York AIDS Coalition, and former health policy adviser to New York City Mayors Dinkins and Giuliani where he served as chair of Strategic Planning and Evaluation for the NYC HIV Planning Council. As a senior faculty member of the American Psychological Association Office of AIDS’ HOPE Project, he provided continuing education, health, and mental health training from coast to coast. Mr. Wirth completed his master’s degree in social work at Hunter College, City University of New York. He is presently a board member of the Association for Community-Affiliated Plans.
