After nearly three decades of continuous NIH funding, the University of North Carolina Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) is entering a new chapter with a new leadership team and a renewed commitment to advancing HIV research.
With the center’s latest award renewal, David Margolis, MD, will serve as contact principal investigator, joined by Angela Kashuba, PharmD, and Audrey Pettifor, PhD, as Co-CFAR Directors. The team succeeds longtime CFAR Director Ron Swanstrom, PhD, who helped secure UNC’s first CFAR award in 1998, with Myron Cohen, MD, and guided the center’s growth into one of the nation’s leading HIV research programs.
Funded by the National Institutes of Health, CFAR is a large, collaborative center grant that supports HIV research across the university. Rather than funding a single project, the grant provides shared research resources, scientific expertise, pilot funding, mentoring, and opportunities for collaboration that help investigators across disciplines advance discoveries in HIV prevention, treatment, and cure research. The center’s success has also depended on strong administrative leadership. Prema Menezes, PhD, CFAR Associate Director, has coordinated the many moving parts of the center’s operations for many years.
The leadership transition reflects a longstanding tradition of renewal within the UNC CFAR. Since its founding, the center has supported generations of scientists, fostered collaborations across laboratory, clinical, and community-based research, and helped launch the careers of early-stage investigators.
“I am excited about the new CFAR leadership,” Swanstrom said in a message to the CFAR community. “They are more than capable of guiding us through these uncertain times. You will recognize their names as world-class scientists with years of experience in our CFAR and in center leadership.”
Swanstrom will continue his involvement with the center as an associate director while remaining active in research. Reflecting on the center’s success, he credited the broader CFAR community. “It is you who have created a CFAR that is considered one of the best CFARs in the group of 20,” he wrote. “For me, the CFAR is a place where people join a community with the expectation that opportunities for help and collaboration are always available.”
“Nearly thirty years later the program continues to thrive,” Cohen wrote in a CFAR announcement. “Under Ron’s leadership our CFAR members have made numerous discoveries, trained many students across different disciplines, and developed a strong relationship with the community.”