Three faculty from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health who conduct HIV/AIDS prevention projects will receive grants from the Fogarty International Center, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). These five-year awards will help fund programs in some of the countries hardest hit by the HIV epidemic in Southeast Asia.
Dr. Roger Detels and Sung-Jae Lee, both on faculty in the Fielding School's Department of Epidemiology, will receive two awards of $1.4 million and $1.5 million to support their ongoing work to provide effective HIV/AIDS education and training in Myanmar and Thailand. UCLA researchers are assisting the Thai Ministry of Public Health by training public health professionals to conduct relevant HIV/AIDS research and to develop intervention strategies for controlling HIV throughout the country. In Myanmar, they are working with the Myanmar University of Public Health to break through more than 50 years of social and cultural isolation to train health students and workers to implement modern HIV control programs.
Pamina Gorbach, also a professor of epidemiology, will receive $1.4 million for her work training Cambodian public health professionals to manage and analyze HIV/AIDS data collected by the Cambodian government. The Fielding School is working with the Cambodian University of Health Sciences to train the next generation of scientists and statisticians to analyze and interpret critical AIDS/HIV health trends and epidemiologic shifts.
The Fogarty International Center plans to award $17 million in grants over the course of five years to fuel research that seeks to answer developing questions about HIV and AIDS in the developing world. The awards are partly funded by NIH partners the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). UCLA's research accounts for three of the 11 total grants awarded.
