Infectious Disease Training Program

The Steering Committee is responsible for the management of the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Training Program, serving both as an Admissions Committee and Leadership Team. The Committee is comprised of ID-Epi researchers and professors with Columbia University and external affiliations.

Mary Ann Chiasson, Dr. PH
Vice President
Research and Evaluation
Medical and Health Research Association of NYC
Associate Professor of Clinical Public Health (Epidemiology)
Mailman School of public Health
E-mail: machiasson@mhra.org

Dr. Mary Ann Chiasson is an epidemiologist who joined Medical and Health Research Association of New York City (MHRA) in 1999 as vice-president for research and evaluation. She oversees all research and evaluation activities at MHRA, a not-for-profit organization that provides health and health-related services, conducts demonstration and research programs, and offers management services in order to improve community health and strengthen health policy. Before joining MHRA, Dr. Chiasson served for nine years as an assistant commissioner of health at the New York City Department of Health with scientific and administrative responsibility for AIDS Surveillance, AIDS Research and Vital Statistics and Epidemiology. Dr. Chiasson's research focuses on the epidemiology of HIV (particularly risk factors for heterosexual transmission and gynecologic manifestations of HIV), women's reproductive health, and infant mortality. She has authored or co-authored more than 40 publications in peer-reviewed journals and was a member of the AIDS and Related Research Study Section (6), Center for Scientific Review, NIH for four years. Dr. Chiasson is also an Associate Professor of Clinical Epidemiology (in Medicine) at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. She has co-directed the course, Epidemiology of HIV/AIDS, since 1989. Dr. Chiasson has served as a thesis advisor for seven M.P.H. students, a dissertation advisor for two Dr.P.H. students at the Mailman School of Public Health, and a dissertation advisor for one Ph.D. student at Yale University.

Wafaa El-Sadr, M.D., M.P.H.
Director, Center for Infectious Disease Epidemiologic Research
Professor, Clinical Medicine and Epidemiology
Chief, Division of Infectious Disease, Harlem Hospital
Mailman School of Public Health Columbia University
Harlem Hospital Center

Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr has long been a leader in HIV research and HIV care, with special interest in issues related to women, minorities and injection drug users. She has successfully obtained funding from federal, state, local sources for research and service projects. She has extensive experience in HIV therapeutic clinical trials as the PI for the Harlem AIDS Treatment Group, an NIH-funded HIV clinical trials unit funded as part of the Community Programs for Clinical Research on AIDS (CPCRA). Since its inception, the Harlem AIDS Treatment Group has enrolled 1,017 patients in 32 HIV clinical trials for the treatment of HIV and its complications. She is co-chair of the CPCRA Steering Committee, chair of the Metabolic Working Group and member of the Science Planning Committee. Dr. El-Sadr is the PI of a NIH-funded HIV Prevention Trials Unit (PRIDE-NYC). This unit involves a consortium of sites including the New York Blood Center, the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies and Bronx Lebanon Medical Center. She is a member of the Microbicide Working Group of the Prevention Trials Network. Dr. El-Sadr also has a longstanding interest in the prevention and treatment of tuberculosis. She is the Director of the CDC-funded Charles P. Felton National TB Center, whose mission is to develop TB-related innovative training and research activities. She is the PI of the NHLBI-funded Pathways to Completion Study, a clinical trial evaluating various behavioral interventions to promote completion of treatment of latent TB infection and TB disease. This study has enrolled over 500 participants from Harlem in these interventions. She established an innovative program to promote TB treatment completion based on a surrogate family model. This program has been able to improve treatment completion rates from 11% to greater than 90%. She is also the PI of the CDC-funded Tuberculosis Treatment Consortium, a TB clinical trials network that is evaluating various prevention and treatment interventions. She is a member of this consortium’s Core Science Group. Dr. El-Sadr has been particularly interested in the impact of substance use on access to HIV care and its impact on adherence with care. Early in the epidemic, she enrolled a large cohort of substance users in a study of the natural history of HIV among substance users in Harlem through the NIMH-funded HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at Columbia University. Another area of recent study has been adherence with antiretroviral therapy. In collaboration with Dr. Sharon Mannheimer, Dr. El-Sadr is currently conducting a NIDA-funded study to evaluate a behavioral intervention to promote adherence that is based on the Prochaska stages of change model. She has also received funding from HRSA to compare an interviewer conducted self-reported adherence questionnaire with a self-administered questionnaire via A-CASI technology. In addition, she has initiated a study to qualitatively assess the nature of the participant peer relationship in the study described. Dr. El-Sadr is experienced in program developments that are service related, training focused and research oriented. This has included the management of various research programs, the development of research studies, the training of a multitude of Infectious Disease postgraduate fellows and the building of successful collaborative programs.

Crystal Fuller, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University, Infectious Disease Epidemiology Training Program Coordinator
Department of Epidemiology
Mailman.School of Public Health.
E-mail: cf317@columbia.edu

Dr. Fuller is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health and an Infectious Disease Epidemiologist with Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies at the New York Academy of Medicine. She completed her doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, School of Public Health in the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Program, garnering extensive experience in design, conduct and analysis of cross-sectional and follow-up studies focusing on HIV, STIs and hepatitis infections among urban populations using community-based methods. Since arriving to New York in 2000, her work has involved adolescent and young adult injection and non-injection drug users and risk for infectious disease, namely HIV. Specifically, Dr. Fuller’s research interests include the correlation between individual-/contextual-level factors (e.g., social network characteristics) and initiation of injection drug use and subsequent HIV/HCV/HBV transmission. Dr. Fuller has recently completed a 5-year prospective cohort study evaluating high-risk behavior among young illicit non-injection and injection drug users, “HOPE Study” (PI, NIDA), and currently co-directs the ACTION Study, a social-network-based risk reduction intervention aimed at reducing sexual risk among non-injection drug users in Harlem and South Bronx (Co-investigator, NIDA). Dr. Fuller has also coordinated the evaluation of harm and risk reduction policies and programs among injection and non-injection drug users – the most recent being the New York Expanded Syringe Access Demonstration Program (ESAP) aimed at increasing access to sterile syringes through pharmacies and health care providers with the goal of reducing multi-person use of needles/syringes (Co-investigator, NIDA funded). Dr. Fuller has also received 5 years of funding from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to examine the social and structural barriers to ESAP among drug users in New York City. Additionally, Dr. Fuller completed a multi-level community-based intervention aimed at increasing participation in pharmacy syringe access (particularly among black and Hispanic drug users) in East and Central Harlem (PI, CDC funded). Finally, her drug abuse, HIV/HCV, and policy research has fostered continued research of racial/ethnic disparities commonly observed in HIV/AIDS, and access to treatment/care. Dr. Fuller advises several infectious disease epidemiology students in the Department of Epidemiology and lectures in two courses in Infectious Disease Epidemiology, “Design of Infectious Disease Studies”, and “Infectious Disease Epidemiology”. Dr. Fuller is committed to increasing the number minority students and faculty through her position as the Chair of the Diversity Committee in the Department and also serves as the Coordinator for the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Training Program in the Department.

Scott M. Hammer, M.D.
Professor of Medicine and Public Health (Epidemiology)
Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons
Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
E-mail: smh48@columbia.edu

Dr. Scott Hammer is Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Harold C. Neu Professor of Medicine, roles he assumed in January, 1999 after moving from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston. His major interests are in the areas of antiretroviral therapy, HIV drug resistance and applied retrovirology. For over 10 years, he has been an investigator in the NIAID sponsored AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) and has chaired a number of studies in that system. Most notably, he chaired ACTG 175, the study of dual nucleoside therapy vs. monotherapy and ACTG 320, the study that proved the clinical benefit of indinavir (a protease inhibitor) over dual nucleoside therapy. These were the two largest studies conducted by the ACTG in the 1990's and contributed to the changing standard of care of HIV infected individuals. More recently, he has chaired ACTG 398, the largest prospective, randomized, partially placebo-controlled trial of dual protease inhibitor combinations in the setting of virologic failure performed to date. He currently serves as Chair of the HIV Research Agenda Committee of the ACTG, the committee responsible for developing and overseeing antiretroviral trials done by the group and is the outgoing Chair of the FDA Advisory Committee on Antiviral Products. As noted previously, he has successfully established an AIDS Clinical Trials Unit and an HIV Vaccine Trials Subunit at Columbia since January of 2000 and is co-chair of the Clinical Core of the Columbia-Rockefeller Center for AIDS Research grant. In addition to establishing the clinical research programs listed, Dr. Hammer has also established a Retrovirology Research Laboratory within the Division of Infectious Diseases. The purpose of this laboratory is to develop and apply new assay techniques to the study of HIV drug resistance, quantitation and expression. This laboratory is one of the 11 designated Virology Support Laboratories of the ACTG that have been established in this new funding cycle. Work in this laboratory will support clinical trials and apply new assays to help us more precisely understand response to antiretroviral agents, therapeutic failure and pathogenesis. It will function as an interface laboratory with the strong basic research in HIV that already exists at Columbia and the HIV clinical research programs that have been described. The existence of the infrastructure provided by the clinical research programs and the Retrovirology Research Laboratory will provide an opportunity for the development of focused, investigator initiated research projects that will be suitable for fellows in training and will provide the choice of a primarily clinical-epidemiologic or laboratory based.

Jessica Justman, MD
Associate Director, Center for Infectious Disease Epidemiologic Research
Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine and Epidemiology
Program Director, University Technical Assistance Project (UTAP)
Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
E-mail: jj2158@columbia.edu

Before coming to Columbia in July 2004, Dr. Jessica Justman worked for 10 years at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center as an Infectious Diseases Attending and was Medical Director of the ID clinic for 3 years. While there, she gained extensive clinical experience in HIV, TB, and other infectious diseases in an inner-city setting. Dr. Justman's research interests are in the areas of microbicides and metabolic side-effects of antiretroviral agents. Within the NIAID-funded HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN), she served as Principal Investigator of the Bronx-Lebanon HPTN site, and conducted two phase I safety studies of vaginal microbicides in both HIV-infected and uninfected women and couples. She has focused on the impact of the microbicides on vaginal flora. Dr. Justman will continue her work in microbicides as co-chair of HPTN 059, a phase II extended safety microbicide study which will enroll women from the Bronx and from India. Dr. Justman has also worked with the NIAID-funded Women's Interagency HIV Study (WIHS) since 1994. WIHS is an ongoing, study of over 2,700 HIV-infected and over 500 HIV-uninfected women from six urban sites in the U.S. This observational cohort is one of the few to include HIV-uninfected controls. She has been interested in the metabolic side-effects of HIV and published the first prospective study on the association between protease inhibitors and the incidence of diabetes. She has also co-authored several other recent publications on metabolic side-effects and HIV. Both WIHS and HPTN provide opportunities for research projects suitable for fellows.

Elaine Larson, R.N., Ph.D.
Professor of Pharmaceutical and Therapeutic Research
Columbia University School of Nursing
E-mail: ell23@columbia.edu

Dr. Elaine Larson has been conducting research related to nosocomial infections and in particular the role of skin flora and hands in transmission from staff to patients for over three decades. She has served on an NIH study section for behavioral aspects of HIV/AIDS and chaired two task forces for The National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR)--an HIV expert panel to develop the HIV/AIDS research agenda for NINR (1985) and an NIH committee to recommend the research agenda for nursing related to emerging infections (1999). Over the past year, she has completed four clinical trials in the acute care setting, examining the effect of various hand hygiene regimens on skin microbiology and the impact of preoperative microbial counts and postoperative surgical site infections in neurosurgical patients. In addition, she has conducted a prevalence survey in the local community of the correlation between home hygiene practices and the prevalence of infectious diseases in 398 households. With degrees in nursing, microbiology and epidemiology, Dr. Larson brings a clinical, patient-oriented focus to her research program. She currently funds two Graduate Research Assistants in the School of Public Health and has two NIH-funded clinical trials: "Home Hygiene Intervention" to examine the impact of antibacterial products used in the home on infectious disease prevalence and emergence of antiseptic resistance, and "Staff Hand Hygiene and Nosocomial Infections in Neonates" to compare the effect of two different staff hand hygiene regimens on nosocomial infections rates in neonates in two intensive care unit.

Ezra Susser, MD, Dr.PH
Professor of Public Health (Epidemiology) and Psychiatry
Head of the Department of Epidemiology
Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
Email: ess8@columbia.edu

Dr. Ezra Susser is Head of the Department of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University, and Department Head, Epidemiology of Brain Disorders at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. His primary research has been on the epidemiology of psychotic disorders. He has studied the interrelationships between homelessness and psychotic disorders; compared psychotic disorders in low and high income countries; and related prenatal exposures to the risk of schizophrenia in adulthood. Starting from his early work on homelessness, and later work on HIV, Dr. Susser has also focused on the health of inner city urban populations, and was formerly director of the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies at the New York Academy of Medicine. He has published on the development of epidemiology as a discipline: genetic epidemiology, psychiatric epidemiology, the integration of infectious and chronic disease epidemiology, and epidemiology more generally. Much of his recent work has been in areas related to infectious disease epidemiology. In schizophrenia research, his team has recently established an association between prenatal exposure to infection and later risk of schizophrenia. Studies have now been initiated to examine whether prenatal infections play a role in other neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism. In HIV/AIDS, he has been a key participant in some large scale efforts to introduce treatment and prevention for HIV/AIDS in Africa, especially in South Africa, through the MTCTPlus global program to treat mothers and children with HIV in resource-poor settings.

David Vlahov, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Urban Epidemiological Studies
New York Academy of Medicine
Professor of Clinical Epidemiology,
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
E-mail: dvlahov@nyam.org

Dr. David Vlahov is a Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Pubic Health, Columbia University and Director of the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies at the New York Academy of Medicine. Dr. Vlahov is an established investigator with funding from both NIH and the CDC to conduct clinical epidemiologic studies of infectious diseases in population based studies. He is principal investigator of the ALIVE cohort in Baltimore Maryland which is currently completing its 16th year of follow-up and for which Dr. Vlahov has received a MERIT Award from NIH. This study, which will be available as a training experience for program students, provides data on 3,000 injection drug users being followed semiannually and an extensive biological repository for nested case control studies. To date there are over 30 doctoral and post-doctoral students who have completed projects relating to this ongoing study. Dr. Vlahov has experience as a mentor, having served as primary advisor for 15 Ph.D. students in epidemiology and 5 post doctoral fellows, as well as served on over 100 different doctoral examining committees. He has had students compete and successfully achieve individual NRSA awards as well as NIH Minority Fellowship Awards. Since coming to the New York Academy of Medicine in January 1999, Dr. Vlahov has received eight NIH or CDC grants or cooperative agreements, which can serve as the basis for local clinical epidemiological studies, including transmission and prevention of HIV, hepatitis C and other blood-borne pathogens. The list of projects is included in the tables within this grant application. For his teaching, Dr. Vlahov has twice received the Golden Apple Award, and an AMTRA (Advising, Mentoring, Teaching Recognition Award) during his years as teaching at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He has served as faculty on a Fogarty International Training Award and two Institutional NRSAs (one from NIAID and the other from NIDA) while at Hopkins, before coming to New York. In addition, Dr. Vlahov is editor in chief of the Journal of Urban Health, so that students with interest in publication can receive a mentored experience in reviewing and editing of scientific publications. Dr. Vlahov has over 330 peer reviewed publications.