UCSF has announced that Paul Volberding, MD, Professor of Medicine, will be the new Director of the AIDS Research Institute (ARI), as well as Director of Research for Global Health Sciences.
As director of ARI, Dr. Volberding will oversee the coordination and integration of all HIV/AIDS activities at UCSF. As director of Research in the Global Health Sciences, he will be responsible for leading, coordinating, and integrating all Global Health Sciences research. Dr. Volberding will continue as the co-director of the UCSF-GIVI Center for AIDS Research (UCSF-GIVI CFAR) at UCSF and the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, and as Director of the Global Health program at UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). Dr. Volberding also serves on the CTSI Board of Directors.
Dr. Volberding has been conducting HIV-related research for several decades. After receiving his undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota, respectively, he finished training at the University of Utah and at UCSF, where he studied for two years as a research fellow in the virology laboratory of Dr. Jay Levy, later a co-discoverer of HIV.
Dr. Volberding’s professional activities centered for many years at San Francisco General Hospital, where he established the Positive Health Program, a model for AIDS patient care, research, and professional education, and served as its director for 20 years. His research career, which began with investigations of HIV-related malignancies, especially Kaposi's sarcoma, later shifted to clinical trials of antiretroviral drugs. He was instrumental in leading early antiretroviral clinical trials, notably ones in early, asymptomatic HIV disease stage raising questions of optimal treatment timing still subject to vigorous debate. He has served for many years on the two major guidelines panels for antiretroviral therapy.
He is co-editor in chief of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, founder and chair of the board of the International AIDS Society–USA, and has served as president of the International AIDS Society and the HIV Medicine Association. He is also co-editor of Global HIV/AIDS Medicine, the extensively rewritten follow-up to the Medical Management of AIDS, formerly the most widely used textbook of HIV medicine.
He was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1999 and has chaired and served on numerous reports for that organization. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences.