CIPHER Advisory Committee

Amara Ezeamama

Amara Ezeamama is a clinical epidemiologist with experience leading prospective and intervention studies in HIV-affected and HIV-unaffected populations in central, eastern, southern and western Africa since 2008. Her ongoing investigations in children perinatally exposed to HIV and adults ageing with chronic HIV are designed to understand modifiable drivers of differences in long-term functional survival, and physical and mental health outcomes. This includes non-communicable disease morbidity burden experienced by people living with HIV for multiple decades while on ART, as well as by children perinatally exposed to HIV and ART without acquiring HIV compared with demographically matched peers without acquisition or exposure.

Elona Toska

Elona is an adolescent health researcher at the Centre for Social Science Research at the University of Cape Town and a Research Associate at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on identifying ways to support adolescents and young people, including adolescents living with HIV and adolescent parents, to have safe and healthy relationships with people in their lives: their children, partners, caregivers, teachers, and healthcare providers. She works closely with colleagues at UNICEF, UNFPA, UNAIDS, The Global Fund, and government partners in Cameroon, Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. 

Helena Nangombe

Helena Nangombe, a community expert in Namibia, has worked with adolescent girls and young women on HIV and SRHR-related issues for over 15 years. She initiated awareness-raising events and founded the Young Women Empowerment Network. Helena is a member of the Robert Carr Fund's International Steering Committee and GNP+ project, supporting EPIC. The GNP+ project advocates for access to quality treatment for paediatric populations and children by supporting meaningful engagement of communities of people living with HIV in spaces where issues relevant to children living with HIV are discussed.

Jorge Pinto

Jorge Pinto is Professor of Pediatrics and Clinical Immunology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. He has been involved in the field of paediatric HIV for more than three decades, having established one of the first and largest cohort of children and adolescents living with HIV in Brazil. He has been a member of the Brazilian Advisory Committee for Pediatric, Adolescent and Perinatal AIDS, National AIDS Program since its establishment in 1995. He has been a member of the IMPAACT/NIH HIV Treatment Scientific Committee since 2006 and the World Health Organization Pediatric Antiretroviral Working Group from 2004 to 2022. He heads the UFMG Clinical Trials Unit and has been involved in multiple Phase 1 to 3 trials on treatment and prevention of HIV-1, COVID-19 and other emerging infections.

Kathleen M Powis

Kate Powis is board certified and practices internal medicine and paediatrics in the US and Botswana. She is also an Associate Professor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a Research Associate at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the health of pregnant women living with HIV and their children, both those who acquire HIV at birth and those born exposed to HIV and do not acquire HIV in Botswana, a country where nearly one in five pregnant women are living with HIV.

Kenneth Ngure

Kenneth Ngure is an Associate Professor of Global Health and the immediate former Dean of the School of Public Health of the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Kenya. He is also Affiliate Associate Professor of the Department of Global Health, University of Washington and a visiting Professor at the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health. He is also a member of the Expert Committee on Clinical Trials of the Kenyan Pharmacy and Poisons Board. 

Kenneth is a member of the Behavioral Research Group of the International Maternal Pediatric Adolescent AIDS Clinical Trials Network (IMPAACT), the Socio-Behavioral and Structural Working Group of the HIV Prevent Trials Network (HPTN), and Office of HIV/AIDS Network Coordination (HANC) Cross-Network Behavioral Science Consultative Group (BSCG). He is Pillar 1 co-lead for the USAID-funded Microbicide R&D to Advance HIV Prevention Technologies through Responsive Innovation and eXcellence (MATRIX) and a member of the MATRIX Executive Steering Committee. These groups are directed towards the development of new biomedical strategies to prevent HIV.

Kenneth is an HIV prevention expert, having been a site investigator in the landmark Partners PrEP trial, which was followed by the Partners (PrEP) Demonstration Project and, more recently, the Partners Scale-UP Project. He is also a member of the PrEP Technical Working Group of the Ministry of Health, Kenya. Recently, Kenneth co-chaired a protocol (MTN-034) to evaluate the safety of and adherence to a vaginal matrix ring containing dapivirine and oral emtricitabine/tenofovir disoproxil fumarate in an African adolescent female population. He is currently leading the behavioural component of several other multisite studies that are looking into simplifying PrEP delivery.

In summary, Kenneth has over 25 years of public health leadership experience gained in diverse HIV and AIDS research settings in central, eastern, southern and western Africa. This includes working as a Program Director for the Organization of African First Ladies Against HIV/AIDS (OAFLA – Kenyan Chapter) and consulting for organizations that include the World Health Organization. He was recently re-elected to represent Africa on the Governing Council of the IAS, where he also sits on the Executive Board as the current President-Elect. Kenneth has authored or co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts.

Nandita Sugandhi

Nandita Sugandhi is currently the pediatric lead for the Global HIV, Hepatitis, and STIs Programme at WHO. She obtained her medical degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and completed her paediatric training at New York University School of Medicine. She has over 18 years of experience providing care to children in Eswatini, Botswana, Tanzania and her home city of New York. She has worked with the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative, the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and ICAP at Columbia University. She continues to serve as a board member of PATA and co-chairs the Pillar 1 working group for the Global Alliance to End AIDS in Children.

Rachel Vreeman

A paediatrician and global health services researcher, Rachel Vreeman is the Chair of the Department of Global Health and Health System Design at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She is also a Professor of Pediatrics and the Director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at Mount Sinai. She specializes in building global partnerships with communities, public-serving health systems, academic medical institutions, governments and businesses to develop, test, implement and scale up innovative solutions to the world's biggest health problems.

Her global clinical and research expertise grew over more than 20 years of work in Kenya with the AMPATH Kenya partnership, helping to develop a large clinical care system to provide HIV care. Her research focuses on helping children living with HIV thrive into adulthood, including sustaining adherence to therapy for HIV, combatting HIV viral resistance, disclosing HIV status to children, mental health challenges and HIV-related stigma. She leads global research cohorts that study and address the challenges faced by adolescents living with HIV in resource-limited settings around the world.

Rachel graduated with a BA from Cornell University (in English literature), completed medical school at the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, and then completed her residency in paediatrics, a chief residency, a fellowship in Pediatric Health Services Research and a Master’s degree in clinical research at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

She has co-authored three popular books debunking medical myths and misinformation with Aaron Carroll. Their research on medical myths has been widely featured in publications such as The New York Times, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Scientific American and Newsweek. She has also appeared on Good Morning America, CBS Evening News, CNN, Dr. Oz, and other national and international television and radio shows.

Renata Sanders

Renata Arrington Sanders is the Division Chief of the Craig-Dalsimer Division of Adolescent Medicine at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine. Previously, Renata was in the Division of Adolescent & Young Adult Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine with a joint appointment in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Departments of Epidemiology and Health, Behavior and Society. She served as the Medical Director of the Pediatric and Adolescent HIV/AIDS Program, Director of the PrEP Program in the Harriet Lane Clinic at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, and co-Director of the Adolescent and Young Adult Scientific Working Group at the Johns Hopkins Center for AIDS Research.

She has spent over 20 years caring for individuals living with HIV and those  vulnerable to HIV acquisition, cultivating research, practice and strategies that address the intersectional and multimodal needs of young people across their life courses and into adulthood. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), and National Institutes of Health National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA, 1R01DA043089-01, 1 R01 DA059022) fund her work. She currently serves on the CDC/HRSA Advisory Committee on HIV, Viral Hepatitis and STD Prevention & Treatment, the Research Review Committee of the American Board of Pediatrics, and the Board of Directors of SIECUS, Sex Ed for Social Change and American Sexual Health Association. She is also cohort representative to the Transform Program for the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Shaffiq Essajee

Shaffiq Essajee is Senior Advisor for UNICEF’s Global HIV Programme. He is a clinician, scientist and public health specialist who has been caring for children with HIV in New York and his native Kenya for over 20 years. He previously served as a Medical Officer for the World Health Organization in Geneva, specializing in the prevention and treatment of children with HIV. Before that, he was Senior Medical Advisor to the Clinton Health Access Initiative, where he led the organization’s innovative paediatric treatment programme.

Tavitiya Sudjaritruk

Tavitiya Sudjaritruk is an Associate Professor and Pediatric Infectious Disease Specialist in the Department of Pediatrics at the Faculty of Medicine, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand. After completing a Pediatric Infectious Diseases Fellowship Training Program, she was awarded the prestigious Ananda Mahidol Scholarship under the Royal Patronage of His Majesty the King of Thailand. This scholarship enabled her to pursue graduate studies abroad at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, in the United States. She earned her Master’s and Doctoral degrees in infectious disease epidemiology from the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2013 and 2016, respectively.

As a physician-researcher with comprehensive training in paediatrics, infectious diseases, epidemiology and public health, her research primarily focuses on HIV and AIDS among children, adolescents and young adults in resource-limited settings. She has served as both a lead investigator and co-investigator in numerous multicentre clinical research studies and has published extensively on topics that include long-term non-infectious complications (e.g., bone demineralization, non-hepatitis liver diseases, cardiovascular diseases, metabolic complications, nephropathy, and mental health disorders), common HIV-related opportunistic infections (e.g., tuberculosis and Talaromyces marneffei), treatment failure, second-line and third-line antiretroviral therapy, pharmacokinetics of new antiretroviral drugs, and vaccination/re-vaccination against key vaccine-preventable diseases in children, adolescents and young adults living with HIV.

Beyond her work in HIV and AIDS, her research interests extend to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, respiratory viral illnesses, vaccine-preventable diseases, and other common paediatric infectious diseases in tropical regions. She is also dedicated to the study of vaccines and immunization in healthy young people. Her contributions to the field have earned her numerous awards and honours.

Thanyawee Puthanakit

Thanyawee Puthanakit is the Division Chief of Pediatric Infectious Diseases in the Faculty of Medicine at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Over the past two decades, she has led several NIH-funded multicentre studies on paediatric and adolescent HIV treatment in Thailand and other Asian countries, including Cambodia and Indonesia. Her research expertise includes prevention of vertical transmission of HIV, optimization of antiretroviral treatment in resource-limited settings, HIV co-morbidities and pre-exposure prophylaxis among adolescents. She has served as a committee member for WHO treatment guidelines and the steering committee of TREAT Asia. She has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles on paediatric HIV.