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

Irving Hoffman, international director of the Institute’s UNC Project-Malawi, offers this report as the country recorded its first death from COVID-19. As of April 8, 2020, despite limited testing, Malawi has recorded 10 COVID-19 cases with one death and some evidence of community spread. UNC Project-Malawi is taking a leading role in support of the … Continued

  Researchers within UNC’s School of Medicine are working tirelessly to provide knowledge to impact the current COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics. “UNC SOM is home to many world-renowned experts on infectious disease and virology,” says Blossom Damania, Boshamer Distinguished Professor and Vice Dean for Research at the UNC School of Medicine. “We are very … 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

The Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases and UNC Project-Malawi were awarded a $4.5 million grant by the UK’s Fleming Fund to strengthen Malawi’s One Health Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) program.  The grant will support the national AMR coordination committee and technical working groups, supporting ownership and alignment and scaling up a One Health AMR mentoring scheme. In the human … 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

UNC has expanded its partnership with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua-León, or UNAN, which since 2003 has encompassed the exchange of research, faculty, and clinical learners, to now include the development of a PhD program housed at UNAN. The program, which offers a PhD in biomedical sciences with mention in infectious diseases, aims to … Continued

Kamuzu Central Hospital in Lilongwe, Malawi, celebrated the opening of its pediatric laboratory with a November 14, 2019 ceremony. The collaborative project was led by Elizabeth Fitzgerald, MD, a pediatric emergency medicine specialist, with support from UNC Project-Malawi and funding from the Malawi Children’s Initiative. Rob Krysiak, MS, co-director of the UNC Project Malawi laboratory, … Continued

  Chlamydia is the most prevalent bacterial sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the world. There is no vaccine to prevent infection. However, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in partnership with colleagues at other sites in the U.S., Europe and Australia, will receive up to $10.7 million over five years from … Continued

A team led by Jeff Stringer, MD, associate director of research for the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases, has received $14 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to conduct two studies aimed at improving pregnancy outcomes in the world’s poorest countries. The interdisciplinary group from departments within UNC’s  School of Medicine … Continued

Researchers at UNC Project-Malawi published 124 articles in scientific journals in 2018, setting a record for UNC Institute for Global Health’s global sites.  Twenty-six of the manuscripts featured Malawian first authors. “Our unit celebrates every publication manuscript coming from UNC Project-Malawi, especially those featuring a Malawian first author,” says Maga Chagomerana, PhD, the project’s director … Continued

Robert Flick is a student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He has completed both the Doris Duke International Clinical Research Fellowship and the UJMT Fogarty Global Health Fellowship. In this blog post, he shares how these fellowships allowed him to conduct operational research in Malawi and pay tribute to a friend and former colleague. I … Continued

Dr. Cohen talks about the rules to fighting infections during the Lancet-CAMS health summit.   Myron Cohen, chief of UNC’s Division of Infectious Diseases and director of the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, visited with UNC Project-China staff and partners in October 2016, making presentations in three cities and serving as keynote speaker … Continued