Third Meeting of the DS-I Africa Consortium
3 November - 9 November 2023

Dr Kristen Stafford - Participant

Role of Data Streams In Informing Infection Dynamics in Africa- INFORM Africa (Co-PI)

Dr. Stafford is an infectious disease epidemiologist with 25 years of experience in the design, implementation, and evaluation of domestic and international HIV care and treatment programs. Domestically she directly implemented Ryan White funded programs as well as served as the Deputy Program Manager and Manager of the Continuous Quality Improvement Program for the Ryan White Part A Program for the Baltimore EMA. Internationally, she served for six years as Director of the Outcomes and Evaluation Program at the Institute of Human Virology - University of Maryland School of Medicine for an eight country, 240 clinic, 700,000 patient HIV care and treatment program funded through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Dr. Stafford has designed and implemented multi-country education and training programs for the integration of monitoring and evaluation and continuous quality improvement programs into HIV programs and served as co-lead author for the WHO guide to implementing quality improvement programs in resource-limited settings. Dr. Stafford's methodological expertise includes complex study design, analytical methods used evaluate patient and program outcomes, immunologic response to antiviral therapy among HIV infected patients, treatment toxicity, retention in the care cascade, and large cohort development and analysis. Her primary research focuses on the epidemiology of aging in the presence of HIV infection and how age is associated with differences in HIV treatment outcomes in resource limited settings with particular focus on immune system recovery and the development of treatment related toxicity and side effects. Dr. Stafford has expertise in advanced epidemiological methods for infectious disease research and serves as the Director of Clinical Research Education Programs in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. She is the Associate Director of the Center for International Health, Education, and Biosecurity at the University of Maryland Baltimore.