Rising to the Occasion
Plaudits for amfAR’s Greg Millett and Annette Sohn, and for the RISE Study, co-sponsored by amfAR
amfAR staff members are extremely proud of the work they do to advance HIV research and advocacy in the U.S. and around the world and to fight for the needs and rights of all people living with HIV or vulnerable to infection. It’s an added bonus when their efforts are publicly recognized, as they were in three instances at this year’s International AIDS Conference in Munich, Germany.
Greg Millett, MPH, amfAR VP and director of public policy, was recently appointed to the Governing Council of the International AIDS Society (IAS) and to the IAS Executive Board. IAS is a global body that works to unite the HIV response across research, policy, and activism. Its Governing Council is elected by members to represent each of the five regions that make up the IAS global body. Members of the council serve terms of three years.
“As a person living with HIV, I have watched the urgency of the national and global HIV response recede over the past two decades and look forward to working with IAS to navigate this less certain phase of the HIV response,” Millett said. “The challenge now is to engage a new generation of champions and to better understand how and where we can achieve epidemic control.”
Annette Sohn, MD, PhD, amfAR VP and director of the TREAT Asia program, received a special commendation from the IAS for her work as coeditor- in-chief of the Journal of the International AIDS Society (JIAS). Dr. Sohn started as co-editor-in-chief in 2018, alongside Kenneth H. Mayer, MD, a member of amfAR’s Program Advisory Council and a former amfAR Trustee.
“An overarching priority for JIAS is to publish science that advances the field, and there are different ways this can be done,” Dr. Sohn said about how she sustains and enriches the prestigious journal’s editorial mission. “One key effort has been to encourage an emphasis on implementation science. Another is to utilize the peer and editorial review processes to improve the clarity of scientific writing to make our papers more relevant to a global audience that includes program implementers as well as academics.”
Dr. Sohn understands her role as editor as part of her broader work to address HIV/AIDS: “HIV research from the Asia-Pacific is underrepresented in English-language journals. This may be related to lower investments into research funding and training relative to other regions, a greater prioritization on clinical care or program implementation than writing papers, language barriers, or other factors. My work with JIAS has informed how I support TREAT Asia network investigators and mentor trainees to communicate our experiences with HIV care to the wider community.”
Also at the conference, the RISE (Representation, Inclusion, Sustainability, and Equity) study was honored with the Robert Carr Research Award, named for the late Jamaican-Trinidadian activist and scholar whose work spotlighted the ways stigma and discrimination perpetuate the HIV/AIDS epidemic. His namesake award is coordinated by the International Council of AIDS Service Organizations (ICASO).
RISE, which is co-sponsored by amfAR, is led by a steering committee of 13 members from 11 countries who joined forces to investigate and improve the grantmaking process of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Study collaborators gathered data on the importance of participation from representatives of key populations in Country Coordinating Mechanisms (CCMs), national committees that develop and submit funding requests to the Global Fund.
The final RISE study report is the result of surveys and in-depth interviews with more than 650 participants from 83 countries and offers seven recommendations to enhance community engagement with CCMs and the Global Fund grantmaking process.
“Community involvement is key to fighting disease as vulnerable and minority populations are often overlooked or otherwise excluded from decision-making processes; we were determined to identify ways to bring more people to the table,” amfAR Director of Research, Public Policy, and RISE report lead author Dr. Jennifer Sherwood said.
Click Here to read more from the December 2024 issue of amfAR INNOVATIONS.
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