Collaborating institutions:
University of Cape Town (programme lead) Vanderbilt University Medical Center Johns Hopkins University
University of Cape Town
Graeme Meintjes
Graeme Meintjes is a Professor of Medicine, Wellcome Fellow and SARChI Chair of Poverty-related Infections at the University of Cape Town. He is an Infectious Diseases Physician who undertakes consultant clinical work at Khayelitsha and Groote Schuur Hospitals. His research focuses on the clinical conditions affecting patients with advanced HIV disease including disseminated HIV-associated tuberculosis, the tuberculosis-associated immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (TB-IRIS) and cryptococcal meningitis. His group also investigates drug-resistant tuberculosis. He has been the PI or local PI of several clinical trials and conducts observational cohort studies that address questions related to disease pathogenesis. Recently, he was PI of the EDCTP-funded PredART trial which demonstrated that prednisone was effective and safe for the prevention of TB-IRIS in patients at high-risk starting antiretroviral therapy. He has contributed to the development of management guidelines for HIV, TB and cryptococcal meningitis at a provincial and national level and World Health Organization Guideline Development Groups.
Andrew Boulle
Andrew Boulle is a Public Health Specialist with the Western Cape Department of Health and Professor in Public Health Medicine at the University of Cape Town. He co-leads the Biomedical Data Integration platform for CIDRI-Africa, focussing on clinical and population health questions which can be addressed through routine clinical and administrative data, and data platform innovations for the linkage of routine data with clinical research and experimental data. Within government he oversees the development of a consolidated environment for person-level health data, which also functions as an information exchange for selected clinical information systems. He leads the African Health Information Exchange (AHIE) project, which develops interoperability solutions in support of services for HIV and TB, and other priority health conditions. A dominant focus of his academic work has been on HIV cohort epidemiology. He is the principal investigator of the Khayelitsha HIV cohort and part of the IeDEA-SA data centre.
Sipho Dlamini
Sipho Dlamini is an associate professor in the division of Infectious Diseases & HIV Medicine, at Groote Schuur Hospital. His clinical and research interests include TB, HIV, adverse drug reactions in TB and HIV and the use of vaccines in adults living with HIV infection.
Gary Maartens
Gary Maartens is head of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology and a chief specialist physician (internist) at Groote Schuur hospital, where he does clinical service in internal medicine and infectious diseases. His main research interests are in therapeutic aspects of HIV-associated tuberculosis, drug-resistant tuberculosis, and antiretroviral therapy in resource-limited settings. He has published over 200 peer reviewed articles, including invited seminars on both tuberculosis and HIV for the Lancet. In 2015 he was awarded a gold medal for outstanding contributions to medical research by the Medical Research Council of South Africa. He was the founding president for the College of Clinical Pharmacologists. He has been involved in international guideline development for the management of HIV and tuberculosis for the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He serves on the Tuberculosis Transformative Science Group of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group, National Institutes of Health.
Jonathan Peter
Associate Professor Jonathan Peter is Head of the Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology at Groote Schuur Hospital. He also heads the Allergy and Immunology Unit at the University of Cape Town Lung Institute. In February 2016, he became the first HPCSA registered allergist in the College of Physicians, South Africa. He is the recipient of a number of awards for medical training including the 2012/2013 Oxford Nuffield Medical Fellowship during which he undertook sub-specialist training in Clinical Immunology and Allergy at the John Radcliffe Hospital and a post-doctoral period in the laboratory of TB vaccinologist, Professor Helen McShane. Jonathan has over 50 publications in high impact factor journals, and an H-index of 27. In 2015, he was awarded a Silver Scientific Merit Award by the South African Medical Research Council as an outstanding early-career researcher . His current clinical and research interests include: i) urticaria and angioedema, ii) drug and food additive allergy, iii) indigenous therapies for allergic diseases and iii) primary immunodeficiency diseases.
Phumla Sinxadi
Associate Professor Phumla Sinxadi is a consultant and Senior Lecturer in the Division of Clinical Pharmacology, UCT. She received a number of awards for her postgraduate training including Discovery Foundation and CIDRI awards, which allowed her an opportunity to spend time at Vanderbilt University with Professor David Haas, an expert in pharmacogenomics. She was the lead investigator of the first-in-man clinical trial investigating the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of MMV390048, a novel antimalarial drug discovered at UCT in collaboration with the Medicines for Malaria Venture and the Department of Science and Technology. In 2016, she was awarded an WHO/TDR Career Development Fellowship and spent a year at the Diseases of the Developing World unit, a research and development department at GlaxoSmithKline in London. Currently, her research is funded by the South African Medical Research Council and the National Research Foundation’s Thuthuka grants. Her main research interests include i) pharmacokinetics and pharmacogenomics of antiretroviral drugs; ii) gene-gene interactions between antiretroviral and antituberculous drugs; and iii) drug development.
Kathryn Wood
After 25 years of medical laboratory experience, Kathryn moved into research administration as the Initiative Manager of the Clinical Infectious Diseases Research initiative (CIDRI) in December 2008. After the success of the Initiative grant which resulted in the completion of 38 CIDRI and Carnegie Foundation doctorates and postdoctoral fellowships in the field of Infectious Diseases, she was appointed as the Operations Manager for the Wellcome Centre for Infectious Diseases Research in Africa, in March 2017. The main responsibilities were to centrally coordinate the activities of the Centre, to support the Director and advise and support the Platform leads and the Steering Committee regarding Centre activities and procedures. Following her retirement from CIDRI-Africa in December 2023, Kathryn was appointed as the Project Co-ordinator for the Fogarty HATTP grant. Her portfolio includes support for the Administrative, Co-ordinating and Training Advisory committees, Fogarty postgraduate student support and organization of all Fogarty HATTP meetings.
Tamsin Phillips
Tamsin Phillips (MPH, PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in the Division of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, School of Public Health at the University of Cape Town. Her work focuses on understanding and supporting long-term ART adherence and retention in care. She is principal investigator on a CIPHER/IAS grant that aims to use routinely available electronic medical record data in the Western Cape to prospectively identify mother-infant pairs with gaps in vertical HIV transmission prevention services and facilitate linkage back to care. She also holds an NIH K43 grant which aims to incorporate patient preferences and choice into the design and implementation of interventions to support re-engagement in HIV care after an interruption.
Previous Administrative Committee Members
Mpho Tlali
Mpho Tlali is a clinician and researcher with an interest in HIV research. She is a senior research officer at the Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Research (CIDER) in the School of Public Health and Family Medicine at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She is part of the IeDEA-SA data centre team and co-leads mental health and substance use research aiming to explore associations and impact on HIV outcomes. She has extensive research experience and has previously managed two large multinational multicentre cohort studies: one evaluating targeted empirical TB treatment based on a novel algorithm for early TB diagnosis in HIV-positive adults with advanced HIV disease, and another exploring the feasibility of implementing a “Universal Test and Treat” programme within correctional service settings in southern Africa.
Jabulani Ncayiyana
Former committee member Jabulani Ncayiyana is an Epidemiologist with research interests in TB, HIV, social determinants of health, child and adolescent health, spatial epidemiology and implementation science. He recently relocated to the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Fogarty HATTP thanks Jabulani for his contributions to the program.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
David Haas
David Haas is Professor of Medicine, Pharmacology, Pathology, Microbiology & Immunology with expertise in pharmacogenomics. He directs the ACTG Human Genomics Core and has led pharmacogenomic analyses across many clinical trials and cohorts. This included the seminal observation that CYP2B6 516G→T predicts plasma efavirenz exposure, which explains increased efavirenz exposure with African descent. He codirects the Training Core of the new Vanderbilt-Miami-Meharry Center of Excellence in Precision Medicine and Population Health (MD010722, a $11.6 million U54), and has mentored numerous trainees with various backgrounds (MD, PhD, PharmD, etc.) on HIV pharmacogenomics.
Timothy Sterling
Timothy Sterling is Professor of Medicine with expertise in HIV and TB epidemiology and treatment. He directs the Vanderbilt Tuberculosis Center, and Tennessee CFAR’s Epidemiology and Outcomes (Epi-Outcomes) Working Group, since its inception in 2003. Since 1998 he has mentored 58 investigators, including 10 who have obtained K23 or K08 awards, and 6 who have R01 funding.
Johns Hopkins University
Richard Chaisson
Richard E. Chaisson, M.D., is Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and International Health and directs the Center for AIDS Research and the Center for Tuberculosis Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD, USA. He received his BS and MD degrees from the University of Massachusetts and trained in internal medicine, infectious diseases, and clinical epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. He is former director of the Johns Hopkins AIDS Service and Medical Director of the Baltimore City Health Department Tuberculosis Control Program, and is founder of the Johns Hopkins Center for TB Research. His research interests focus on tuberculosis and HIV infection, including epidemiology and natural history, clinical trials, diagnostics and public health interventions. From 2002-2014 he organized and led the Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS-TB Epidemic (CREATE), a Gates Foundation-sponsored research consortium studying novel public health approaches to reduce the burden of HIV-related TB. In 2012 he reestablished the Johns Hopkins Center for AIDS Research (CFAR), revitalizing a multidisciplinary program to catalyze innovative HIV research, with a special focus on combatting the Baltimore epidemic. He co-chairs the South African REgional Prospective Observational Research on TB (RePORT) Consortium Steering Committee. Dr. Chaisson has published over 490 scientific papers and chapters, and his Handbook of Tuberculosis, co-edited with Jacques Grosset, was published in 2017.
Jonathan Golub
Jonathan Golub is Associate Professor of Medicine and a leading investigator in the JHU Center for TB Research, where he focuses on epidemiology, detection and prevention of TB in LMICs. He developed a JHU based ICOHRTA training program for Brazilian researchers: over 100 trainees attended the program over 10 years. For 3 years, this program was extended through a Fogarty AITRP supplement to include trainees in HIV-related malignancies from Brazil and SA. He has led cluster randomized trials and prospective cohort studies in South Africa, Brazil and India investigating preventive therapy and case finding strategies for TB, and the association between TB and diabetes, tobacco use and indoor air pollution. He is currently PI on NIH R01 studies in India, Brazil and South Africa.