UCLA FSPH faculty awarded more than $4.3 million to research and combat aids in Southeast Asia
FSPH professors are helping to implement modern HIV/AIDS training and tracking programs in Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia.
September 19, 2014
The Fogarty International Center, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has announced plans to award grants to three HIV/AIDS prevention projects headed by faculty from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
Dr. Roger Detels and Dr. Sung-Jae Lee with the Fielding School's Department of Epidemiology will receive two awards of $1.4 million and $1.5 million for their ongoing efforts to provide effective HIV/AIDS education and training in Myanmar and Thailand, according to an announcement by Fogarty. Dr. 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.
For 25 years, the UCLA/Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program has provided education and training leading to a master's or doctoral degree for health professionals from developing nations, and informal education for many others.
These five-year awards will help fund programs in some of the countries hardest hit by the HIV epidemic in Southeast Asia. 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. And in Cambodia, 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.