International Expert to Lecture on Challenges to Develop AIDS Vaccine
Seth Berkley
Seth Berkley, MD, president and CEO of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), will present a lecture titled “The Path is Not Always Straight: The Challenges of Developing an AIDS Vaccine for the World.”
The campus community is invited to hear Berkley deliver the annual Salvatore Pablo Lucia Memorial Lecture in Preventive Medicine on Monday, April 5, from 4 to 5:30 p.m., in the UCSF School of Nursing, room N 217, on the Parnassus campus.
A reception will immediately follow in the School of Nursing mezzanine.
Berkley, who specializes in infectious disease epidemiology and international health, founded and leads IAVI, a not-for-profit organization working to develop safe, effective, accessible, preventive HIV vaccines for use throughout the world.
AIDS is the No. four killer in the world and the No. one killer in Sub-Saharan Africa. Current prevention methods, while effective if used, clearly aren’t sufficient given that nearly 7,400 people become infected with HIV each day. In the last year, scientific advances have shown more promise of developing an effective AIDS vaccine than in the 25 years prior creating a virtual renaissance in AIDS vaccine development. Berkley will discuss these recent advances as well as the evolution of the effort.
IAVI is a global product-development partnership working to accelerate the development of preventive HIV vaccines for use throughout the world. The organization has developed and tested seven candidate vaccines over past decade and conducted 25 vaccine trials in 11 countries. IAVI also has helped to establish a world-class network of research centers in Africa and India, and research collaborations, resulting in accomplishments amidst the challenging goal of AIDS vaccine design and development.
Prior to founding IAVI in 1996, Berkley was an officer of the Health Sciences Division at the Rockefeller Foundation, and worked for the Center for Infectious Diseases of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and for the Carter Center, where he was assigned as an epidemiologist at the Ministry of Health in Uganda.
Berkley has been featured as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and included in The Wired 25 list, a salute to dreamers, inventors, mavericks and leaders. He is currently adjunct professor of medicine at Brown University and adjunct professor of Public Health at Columbia University.
The annual UCSF lecture recognizes Salvatore Pablo Lucia, a faculty member for 53 years who was a distinguished physician and medical educator. Lucia joined the UCSF faculty in 1932 after graduating first in his class. In 1956, he became chair of the newly created Department of Preventive Medicine, a position he held until his retirement. His ecological views of disease and its prevention were often far ahead of his time and today are an integral part of the fields of epidemiology and preventive medicine.
UCSF Global Health Sciences is a co-sponsor of this lecture.
For more information about the lecture, email Robert Mansfield or call him at 415/476-0509.
Related Links:
International AIDS Vaccine Initiative