Diane Havlir, MD
Diane Havlir, MD is a UCSF Professor and Chief of the HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine Division at ZSFG, home to world-renowned HIV research and Ward 86 clinical program. She is also the Associate Chair of Clinical Research in the Department of Medicine, Principal Investigator of the Sustainable East Africa Research in Community Health (SEARCH) Collaboration, Director of the UCSF AIDS Research Institute (ARI), and serves as Robert L. Weiss Memorial Chair for HIV/AIDS Research. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019.
Dr. Havlir was a resident at UCSF when the AIDS epidemic emerged in the 1980s, and has cared for HIV patients and conducted research—transforming national and international guidelines ever since. She is a long-standing NIH-funded investigator with over 400 publications including in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and other high impact journals. Dr. Havlir was a Co-founder and continues as Co-chair of San Francisco Getting to Zero (GTZ), a citywide consortium with a goal to eliminate new HIV infections and deaths. Dr. Havlir has been very active globally via leadership roles in the World Health Organization (WHO), having chaired the HIV global drug resistance surveillance network, and the HIV-TB working group. She co-chaired the WHO HIV treatment and prevention global guidelines, and Chaired the United Nations AIDS Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee, which provides high-level guidance on global action to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
The overall goal of her research is to develop therapeutic and prevention strategies to respond to global infectious disease pandemics: HIV, TB, and COVID-19. Antiretroviral therapy—for prevention or treatment—is one of the greatest successes in medicine, yet we have not fully used it to eliminate HIV or its complications such as tuberculosis (TB). In the first SEARCH study, Dr. Havlir and her team showed that a multi-disease, patient-centered approach to HIV testing and treatment reduced HIV incidence, HIV-associated tuberculosis and HIV-associated mortality, while improving population-level control of hypertension in a NIH-funded 320,000-person cluster-randomized study in rural East Africa. She continues towards her goal to accelerate the end of AIDS through the SEARCH-Sapphire study, which is testing an innovative “Community Precision Health” strategy which uses a multi-disease approach to incorporate AI and machine learning into delivery systems on a path to universal healthcare.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Havlir established the city-community-academic partnership Unidos en Salud, which provided low barrier test-and-respond and vaccine services to thousands of persons and tracked epidemiologic trends in the Mission district of San Francisco. This collaboration with the Latino Task Force, CZ Biohub, SFDPH and BayPLS is now studying molecular epidemiology of circulating respiratory viruses and prototyping new approaches to provide vaccine, testing and treatment services to the disproportionately affected Latinx population.