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

Dr Peter Kilmarx - Speaker

National Institutes of Health (NIH) (NIH Staff)

Dr. Kilmarx is Acting Director of the Fogarty International Center and Acting Associate Director for International Research at the National Institutes of Health. He joined Fogarty as Deputy Director on July 1, 2015, and assumed his current roles on January 15, 2023. Dr. Kilmarx is an expert on infectious disease research and HIV/AIDS prevention. During his tenure at Fogarty he has led analysis of NIH global health activities, built coalitions with high-level NIH and external stakeholders, and represented the Center and NIH in national and international forums. He co-lead an initiative to transform African health professional education and research, resulting in the formation of the African Association for Health Professions Education and Research (AFREHealth), as well as the African Postdoctoral Training Initiative (APTI), which brings African postdoctoral fellows to NIH. He has also focused on efforts to increase equity in global health research and build global capacity for pandemic preparedness . He previously served as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Country Director in Zimbabwe, providing oversight for 30 CDC staff who managed implementation of the U.S. efforts to reduce HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria. A Rear Admiral and Assistant Surgeon General in the U.S. Public Health Service, Dr. Kilmarx served as the CDC Ebola response team leader in Sierra Leone in September-October 2014, and as principal deputy team leader in Guinea in January-February 2015. Previously, he initiated the CDC response to the Ebola outbreak in Kasai Occidental, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in 2007, and led household surveillance in the Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, DRC, in 1995. Dr. Kilmarx held a variety of leadership positions at the CDC, including senior advisor to the Director for Health Reform and chief of the Epidemiology Branch-both in the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. He also served as director of the CDC partnership with Botswana to combat HIV/AIDS, TB and related conditions, as well as the chief of the CDC's Sexual Transmission Research Section in Thailand. Previously, he completed assignments in Pakistan and the DRC. An experienced clinical trials manager, he has served as principal investigator on microbicide trials in Thailand, as senior investigator on TB and HIV trials in Botswana, and as principal investigator on HIV studies he initiated at public health facilities in Zimbabwe. After earning his M.D. from Dartmouth-Brown's Combined Program in Medicine, Dr. Kilmarx completed both his internal medicine residency and infectious disease clinical fellowship at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. He remains board-certified in both specialties and is a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and of the American College of Physicians. He has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and serves on the editorial board of Sexually Transmitted Diseases. He began his international career as a Peace Corps volunteer in the DRC (then Zaire), where he helped develop fisheries that are still productive today. Dr. Kilmarx has received numerous awards including the NIH Director's Group Award for piloting an NIH-Wide China Office at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing to more effectively support and accelerate NIH's research investments in China, the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) Distinguished Service Medal for a distinguished USPHS career responding to HIV/AIDS and other infectious disease threats and building health research capacity worldwide, and the USPHS Presidential Unit Citation, for "extraordinary courage and the highest level of performance in action throughout the United States Government's response to the Ebola outbreak."