Recently published in eBioMedicine, this study represents the work of the late Professor Steve Meshnick who served as mentor to Andreea Waltmann, a postdoctoral scholar with the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases. Dr. Meshnick died August 5, 2020.  Malaria in pregnancy (MiP) is a major public health problem with substantial risks for mothers and their babies. The combination … Continued

The first two graduates of UNC’s Immunocompromised Host Infectious Disease Fellowship program have successfully landed faculty positions. Tyler Lambing, MD, the 2019-2020 fellow, has joined Baylor College of Medicine as an assistant professor. Daphne-Dominique Henson Villanueva, MD, the 2020-2021fellow, begins her post as an assistant professor at the West Virginia University in July 2021. The … Continued

UNC Global Women’s Health has received two new grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for work on pregnancy outcomes in Zambia. The first grant funds the “Multi-omics for Mother and Infants (MOMI) Consortium,” which seeks to identify new predictive biomarkers for preterm birth, preeclampsia, stillbirth and fetal growth restriction. UNC Project-Zambia is one … Continued

Six students from Dzama, Malawi — three girls and three boys — have received scholarships to attend private school and receive individual tutoring as the inaugural class of “Charlie Scholars.” The Charlie van der Horst Malawi Scholars Program, administered by UNC Project-Malawi and the UNC Medical Foundation, honors the late UNC infectious diseases physician who … Continued

Cell Microsystems and UNC’s HIV Cure Center will continue their work on developing an automated assay that can measure single cells for latent HIV, thanks to a two-year, $1.65 million contract from the National Institutes of Health. The new contract, a highly competitive phase II Small Business Innovation Research award, affirms the partners’ success resulting … Continued

A team of UNC researchers are partnering with colleagues at four institutions in Africa to study HIV-associated malignancies. With a five-year, $6 million grant from the NIH’s National Cancer Institute, the research consortium will look at screening and diagnosing innovations for three cancers common to people with HIV: Kaposi sarcoma, cervical cancer and lymphoma. Leading … Continued

“There are few people like him,” as a long-term collaborator and friend said. “Steve was so humble and generous that I don’t think he really understood the impact he had on the people around him. He profoundly changed for the better the lives of so many people he worked with and trained, without ever asking … Continued

Five fellows joined UNC’s Division of Infectious Diseases in July for the 2020-2021 academic year. The trainees gain clinical and research experience along with career guidance and mentoring by the division’s faculty members. One of the fellows, Daphne-Dominique Henson Villanueva, MD, will be doing advanced training in immunocompromised host infectious diseases and antimicrobial stewardship.

Four appointments in 2020 have expanded the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases’ Leadership Team. The team’s members bring unique expertise, experience, and perspectives from across the University of North Carolina’s health science schools to set strategy and lead the growth of one of UNC’s preeminent research centers. “Since our founding in 2007, the … Continued

By the spring of 2020, the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic caused many researchers affiliated with UNC’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases to pivot their studies to focus on testing, treatment and prevention of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Here, a look at some of the projects underway in the last two years.   Development … Continued

  Three Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases representatives joined the May 21 UNC Board of Trustees meeting to talk about COVID-19 and the university’s response to the pandemic. Institute Director Myron Cohen, MD, talked about how so many of our researchers have pivoted their work to COVID, working on the development of vaccine … Continued

  By Myron Cohen, MD Our UNC infectious diseases community, encompassing many disciplines, has responded remarkably to COVID-19. Our physicians have been deployed to patient care and to advise the University and health system’s leadership. Researchers are quickly pivoting their work to focus on COVID. Among the many who have responded quickly: David Wohl and … Continued

Linghua Li, MD, PhD, is an infectious disease specialist and AIDS clinic director at Eighth People’s Hospital in Guangzhou, China. She did two years of postdoctoral training in infectious diseases at Duke University and at UNC, working with the Institute’s David Wohl, MD. Here, she reports from the frontlines on dealing with COVID-19 in Guangzhou, which is about 600 miles from … Continued

Overcoming HIV latency – induction of HIV in CD4+ T cells that lay dormant throughout the body – is a major step toward creating a cure for HIV. For the first time, scientists at UNC-Chapel Hill, Emory University, and Qura Therapeutics – a partnership between UNC and ViiV Healthcare – have shown that a new … Continued