During my years as a clinician educator in the HIV program and Infectious Disease division, I directed a variety of healthcare capacity building efforts. These included the upper Manhattan Clinical Education Initiative, a NYS DOHMH AIDS Institute sponsored HIV educational initiative that targeted community-based physicians, nurses and physician assistants (1995-2003) and the Nicholas A. Rango HIV Scholars Program, a post graduate training program focused on ambulatory HIV care (1998-2010). I directed quality improvement efforts for the Columbia University Irving Medical Center HIV program and used QI methodology to expand HIV testing, initiate HIV testing in the Emergency Department (using NYC DOH grant funding), and institute point-of-care testing to ambulatory sites throughout New York-Presbyterian Medical Center. I was elected to the Glenda Garvey/Virginia Apgar Academy of Outstanding Medical Educators, directed global health training for the Internal Medicine residency program at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and served as Chief of Service for the NYPH inpatient Infectious Diseases service.
In 2009, I had the opportunity to teach at the Infectious Diseases Institute in Kampala, Uganda. Later, I worked on curriculum development for the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI) collaboration between the Columbia University ID division and Nelson Mandela School of Medicine in Durban, South Africa. These experiences engaged my desire to work on a broader, and more scientific and more international, basis.
In 2018, I realized the opportunity to expand my focus on HIV treatment to an international scale and to step more definitively into the era of HIV prevention. I moved to a position in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University ICAP program. I am currently an Adult Care and Treatment specialist providing support for HIV care and treatment capacity building efforts in Ukraine, Central Asia, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic, and serving as a co-investigator on studies of HIV prevention at the Bronx Prevention Center. .