Thanks to a new $1.34 million grant from the Fogarty International Center and National Institutes of Health, the Duke Global Health Institute and partners at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC) will embark on a new training program that builds capacity for HIV/AIDS research in Tanzania.
The five-year grant funds the Sociobehavioral Sciences Research Core at KCMC, which enables Duke and KCMC to train and mentor master’s and PhD-level trainees on conducting high quality research related to HIV. With the goal of tackling Tanzanian’s high burden of HIV, the trainees will study various aspects of HIV, including voluntary counseling and testing, linkage and retention in care, adherence to medications, and co-morbidities of mental illness and substance abuse.
“Sociobehavioral sciences research skills are essential for understanding these critical issues relating to HIV testing, treatment and care,” said John Bartlett, lead investigator of the grant and professor of medicine and global health at Duke Medicine and the Duke Global Health Institute. “We’re excited to work with our partners to train a new generation of researchers who we hope can ultimately inform Tanzanian health and government officials on how best to address HIV/AIDS and improve care.”
The Core is a direct response to national Tanzanian priorities for optimizing the care of people living with HIV. The grant supports six master’s and PhD-level trainees in the first year, who will be focused in the areas of epidemiology and public health, health promotion and behavior, psychiatry, and psychology. Other areas of focus in the future will be on mental illness, point-of-care diagnostics, nursing, data management and research administration.
The trainees’ research will expand existing collaborative research efforts between KCMC and Duke and foster the development of new opportunities with the University of Cape Town – another collaborator on the training grant.
Duke is one of 22 recipients of FIC’s new HIV Research Training Program. It is partly supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
