Research interests
Background:
Wafaa El-Sadr, MD, MPH, has had a longstanding career at Harlem Hospital as Chief of the Infectious Disease Division and as the Director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Epidemiologic Research at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She is a Professor of Clinical Medicine and Epidemiology. She obtained a MD from Cairo University, a MPH in epidemiology from the Mailman School of Public Health and a MPA from the Kennedy School for Government at Harvard University.
Dr. El-Sadr has led the Division of Infectious Diseases at Harlem since 1988 and was instrumental in the development of a nationally and internationally acclaimed HIV program at that institution. She developed HIV care programs that were specifically designed to meet the needs of patients from the Harlem community including women and substance users with HIV/AIDS. She has also developed a program that provides care to HIV-infected women and their children in a family-centered model of care at Harlem Hospital.
Dr. El-Sadr is also the Director of the MTCT plus Initiative. This Initiative aims at providing HIV-infected women and their children with access to HIV care in resource limited settings. The Initiative will fund sites in resource limited countries that are already providing interventions to prevent maternal to child HIV transmission with the resources to extend that care to the women, their HIV-infected children and their partners.
She has been instrumental in providing persons with HIV access to clinical trials through her pioneering work in community based HIV research in Harlem. She has been a leader in the NIAID funded Community Programs for Clinical Research on AIDS (CPCRA). Her role has included the design and implementation of multicenter clinical trials. Since the inception of the CPCRA unit at Harlem Hospital, more than 1,200 HIV-infected patients have been enrolled in HIV clinical trials. Through her devotion to community participation and her commitment to developing partnerships with patients, this unit has served as a national model of the successful integration of clinical research in community based care settings. More recently, Dr. El-Sadr established an NIAID-funded Prevention Trials Unit to assess interventions for the prevention of HIV infection. This unit was established in collaboration with Beryl Koblin at the New York Blood Center, David Vlahov at the New York Academy of Medicine and Jessica Justman at the Bronx Lebanon Medical Center. She is currently participating in the design and implementation of several vaginal microbicide studies.
Dr. El-Sadr has also been a leader in the area of tuberculosis (TB). She developed the Harlem Directly Observed Therapy (DOT) Program with its innovative “surrogate” family model. The use of this model significantly contributed to curbing the raging TB epidemic in Harlem in the early 1990’s. Since 1996, she has lead the Charles P. Felton National TB Center at Harlem Hospital. This program is funded by the CDC to develop models of care, initiate creative research programs, and respond to local and national TB-related training needs. She has designed and implemented many studies for the prevention and treatment of TB and been an active member of the PHS Advisory Council for the Elimination of TB. Her interest in TB extends to the current epidemic in South Africa where she and Zena Stein are leading a study of the epidemiology of HIV and TB in a community on the outskirts of Cape Town. She has also been working Drs. Slim and Quorraisha Abdool Karim and Dr. Gerald Friedland on a pilot study to introduce antiretroviral therapy to patients with tuberculosis in Durban.
Dr. El-Sadr established the Center for Infectious Disease Epidemiologic Research (CIDER) in the Department of Epidemiology. The Center was able to obtain funding through NIAID for establishing a training program in Infectious Diseases Epidemiology. Other training activities include her role as an investigator in the CDC funded Center for Public Health Preparedness where she has developed an assessment of the training needs and practices of Infectious Diseases physicians throughout the country in relation to bioterrorism preparedness.
