NIH Record - National Institutes of Health

Hill Lecture on Controlling HIV Pandemic Set for Apr. 30

Dr. Havlir
Dr. Diane Havlir

HIV physician-scientist Dr. Diane Havlir will give the 2019 James C. Hill Memorial Lecture on Tuesday, Apr. 30 at 3 p.m. in Lipsett Amphitheater, Bldg. 10. Her talk, “Ending AIDS: The Wild West,” will examine strategies used to control the HIV epidemic in San Francisco and rural western Uganda and Kenya, highlighting insights from each approach.

Havlir is chief of HIV, infectious disease and global medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, where she directs the renowned HIV clinic Ward 86. She also is professor and associate chair of clinical research in the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. In addition, she chairs the United Nations AIDS scientific and technical advisory committee, which provides guidance for global action on HIV/AIDS.

In 2014, Havlir co-founded San Francisco: Getting to Zero, a city-wide initiative to eliminate new HIV infections and HIV-related deaths. She also leads a large clinical trial called SEARCH in Uganda and Kenya in which everyone in participating communities was tested for HIV—primarily at multi-disease health fairs—and those who tested positive were offered immediate access to HIV care and treatment. The study found that this approach helped communities surpass UNAIDS targets for HIV diagnosis, treatment and viral suppression and improved overall population health.   

In her lecture, Havlir will discuss how the Getting to Zero program has helped cut San Francisco’s HIV incidence in half over 5 years and the need for new strategies to boost population-level viral suppression further. She also will describe the effect in the SEARCH study of integrating HIV testing with screening for other diseases and the lessons this offers for San Francisco and beyond. 

The Hill Lecture series is dedicated to the memory of former NIAID deputy director Dr. James C. Hill, who played a critical role in shaping NIAID’s HIV/AIDS research agenda during the early years of the epidemic. 

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