Biographies - HIV/AIDS
Dr. Harold Jaffe trained in internal medicine at UCLA Hospital and in infectious diseases at the University of Chicago Hospitals. He has spent most of his career at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was a member of the original CDC Task Force assigned to study a new disease that became known as AIDS. Dr. Jaffe has held a number of AIDS leadership positions at CDC, including directing the National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention. From 2004 to 2010, he was Professor and Head of the Department of Public Health at the University of Oxford, and he now serves as CDC’s Associate Director for Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Jim Curran joined the Rollins School of Public Health (RSPH) as dean and professor of epidemiology in 1995, following 25 years of leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He is co-director of the Emory Center for AIDS Research, and holds faculty appointments in the Emory School of Medicine and the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. In 1981, Curran was tapped to lead a CDC task force charged with determining what was behind the first cases of what we now know as AIDS. A pioneer in HIV/AIDS prevention, Curran led the nation’s efforts in the battle against HIV/AIDS for 15 years before joining Emory. While at the CDC, he attained the rank of assistant surgeon general. In 2009, the Rollins School of Public Health Dean’s position was named the James W. Curran Dean of Public Health in his honor.
At the time of the first reported cases of HIV in 1981, Dr. Dowdle, a virologist by training, was serving as the CDC Assistant Director for Science and Director of the newly formed Center for Infectious Diseases. In 1986, he moved to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (HHS) in Washington to establish the office of Coordinator for AIDS Activities, Public Health Service (PHS). He returned to Atlanta in 1987 to serve as the CDC Deputy Director (AIDS), becoming the Deputy Director, CDC and Deputy Administrator, ATSDR later that year. Dr. Dowdle served twice (1989 and 1993) as the Acting Director, CDC, and Acting Administrator, ATSDR. He served with the Task Force for Global Health, Atlanta, from 1994 to 2012, primarily on global programs related to malaria reduction and polio eradication. During that time, he also chaired the HIV Vaccine Data and Safety Monitoring Boards for the University of Washington Vaccine Trials Network (2003-2009) as well as the Phase III trials sponsored by the US Department of Defense (Thailand, 2003-2009) and VaxGen, (Thailand, 1998-2003). He currently remains active with WHO on polio eradication.
Dr. Martha Rogers currently serves as a Research Professor at Emory University’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, where she directs the Lillian Carter Center for Global Health and Social Responsibility (LCC). She is also the HIV/AIDS Program Director at the Task Force for Global Health, a non-profit public health organization affiliated with Emory University. Before coming to Emory University in 2001, Dr. Rogers spent 20 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), mostly in work related to the control of HIV/AIDS worldwide. Dr. Rogers is an expert known nationally and internationally in the field of HIV/AIDS in women and children. She established the first surveillance systems for AIDS in children and one of the first longitudinal studies of mother-to-child (perinatal) transmission of HIV. She also helped establish one of the first studies to examine perinatal transmission among women and children in Africa. Her work in collaboration with CDC laboratories was the first to show the utility of using DNA polymerase chain reaction methodology to diagnose HIV infection in infants.