Durrant Named Director of CSR Division

Dr. Valerie Durrant

The Center for Scientific Review has named Dr. Valerie Durrant to become director of its Division of AIDS, Behavioral and Population Sciences. She has been chief of CSR’s population sciences and epidemiology integrated review group since 2011.

Durrant will coordinate five integrated review groups, which review NIH grant applications for scientific merit: AIDS and related research; biobehavioral and behavioral processes; health care delivery and methodologies; population sciences and epidemiology; and risk, prevention and health behavior. 

She is chair of CSR’s best practices committee and served as acting director of CSR’s Division of Neuroscience, Development and Aging in 2015. Durrant previously served as scientific review officer for the social sciences and population studies panel B study section. 

Before coming to NIH, Durrant was a program officer at the National Academies’ committee on population. She directed studies on the transition from childhood to adulthood in developing countries that assessed the benefits of investing in youth in these countries. 

Durrant holds a Ph.D. in sociology with an emphasis in demography from the University of Maryland. She was a Berelson postdoctoral fellow at the Population Council, conducting research on adolescents and on the influence of the status of women on infant and child mortality and children’s schooling in Pakistan.