#35 Leadership Chat: Richard Marlink, Director, Rutgers Global Health Institute

We discussed a number of things including: 1. Richard's background and his impact on population health worldwide 2. Progress on the COVID-19 response - vaccines and treatments 3. Concerns about inequity in relation to the pandemic 4. Programs that are addressing these challenges Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, Richard Marlink, MD, has worked to establish HIV/AIDS research, training, and clinical care programs in the United States and abroad. He was instrumental in setting up the first HIV/AIDS clinic in Boston, and in the mid-1980s in Senegal, he was part of the team of Senegalese, French, and American researchers who discovered evidence for and then studied the disease outcomes of the second type of human AIDS virus, HIV-2. Previously at Harvard, Marlink helped create two partnerships with the government of Botswana: the 1996 Botswana-Harvard Partnership with the Harvard AIDS Initiative, where he was executive director, and the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnerships, a public-private partnership with the government of Botswana that was launched in 2000 with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates and Merck foundations. Also in 2000, Marlink founded the Kitso AIDS Training Program, which would become Botswana’s national AIDS training program. Kitso means “knowledge” in the local Setswana language. Marlink was the principal investigator for “The Tshepo Study,” the first large-scale antiretroviral treatment study in southern Africa, funded by the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation’s Secure the Future initiative. His research in the region also includes clinical and epidemiological evaluations to help determine how antiretroviral treatment and national treatment programs can best be accomplished in Africa. Since 2000, programs he has created and/or led have trained tens of thousands of health care workers and helped establish national programs on the care, treatment, and prevention of HIV/AIDS in several African countries. Following the 2003 launch of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to combat global HIV/AIDS, the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in history, Marlink was Botswana’s country director for the Botswana-Harvard PEPFAR effort. In addition, while serving as scientific director and vice president for implementation at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, he was principal investigator of Project HEART, another PEPFAR Track 1.0 effort in five African countries. Project HEART began in 2004 and by 2011 had placed more than one million people living with HIV into clinical care sites in Cote d’Ivoire, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia. More than 565,000 were placed on life-saving antiretroviral treatment.