Dr. Mina Hosseinipour’s interest in infectious diseases and medicine began when she was a medical resident in Houston, Texas. Many patients were immigrants, and she was treating several for HIV using a new combination of anti-HIV drugs commonly known as HAART.
“It made me want to understand why certain diseases were more common in resource-limited settings,” Hosseinipour said. “I wanted to know what I can do to make this treatment more accessible to the places where there’s the greatest need.”
So, she enrolled in the master of public health program at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.
In 2001, after two years in Chapel Hill, Hosseinipour traveled to Lilongwe, Malawi, as an Infectious Diseases Fellow for UNC Project-Malawi. The program is the flagship site of the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases (IGHID). There, American and Malawian researchers have been conducting research on HIV and sexually transmitted diseases in collaboration with the Malawi Ministry of Health for 35 years.
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