Faculty Q&A With Wafaa El-Sadr

As a recent medical school graduate of Cairo University, Wafaa El-Sadr arrived in the U.S. in 1976 confident that more training in medicine would help her meet the challenges of curing infectious diseases in poor countries around the world, like her native Egypt. "Many of us in the infectious disease field believed we could have almost an immediate impact—we could treat people who were sick with an infection and get them well rapidly," she said. "HIV changed that notion completely." El-Sadr's training and work here in the U.S. coincided with the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and she found herself among a host of doctors struggling to treat an incurable and deadly disease. "We were confronting something that we had never, ever in our wildest dreams imagined." Working at Harlem Hospital, where she was chief of infectious diseases for two decades, and later based at the Mailman School of Public Health, El-Sadr pioneered programs for poor and immigrant patients with HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (the diseases frequently strike in tandem). Her approach proved successful in engaging patients and their families in comprehensive programs. Building on lessons learned in Harlem, she then confronted the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia under the aegis of ICAP at the Mailman School, the center she founded and heads. In 2008, El-Sadr was named a MacArthur Fellow, often referred to as the genius award, for her ground-breaking work in responding to the HIV and tuberculosis epidemics in the U.S. and abroad.