Indonesian AIDS Research Center
About the program Heading link
Indonesia continues to experience a serious HIV epidemic that affects multiple vulnerable populations across a geographic span of approximately 18,000 inhabited islands. The Fogarty Training Program in Advanced Research Methods and Translational Science (D43TWO10935) is designed to help produce the science needed to guide Indonesia’s response to this national challenge.
Directed by Judith Levy, PhD, associate professor emerita of health policy and administration, the program represents a partnership between the faculties of UIC and the Atma Jaya Catholic University (AJCU) in Jakarta. To this end, one of the program’s goals is to train a cadre of highly prepared Indonesian investigators with the research skills needed to conduct innovative studies that will advise Indonesia’s HIV social policy, intervention programming and social/medical services. The program currently supports two AJCU young faculty members who are earning their PhDs at the UIC School of Public Health, as well as two post-doctoral fellowships undertaking HIV methods training.
The program also is dedicated to building the institutional research capacity of the AIDS Research Center (ARC) at AJCU, which was founded through funding from the National Institutes of Health to Drs. Levy and Irwanto (a former Fogarty Indonesian SPH post-doc), to conduct and advance HIV research throughout the archipelago (5R24HD056642).
In July 2020, in recognition of its success in meeting this mission, the Indonesian Ministry of Higher Education formally named ARC as “The AIDS Research Center of Excellence in Policy Study and Social Innovation” for Indonesia. The current HIV training program, a partnership between SPH and the UIC College of Nursing (D43TW001419), is the programmatic successor to the Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program (AITRP) that Levy directed from 2000 – 2018. The UIC AITRP supported and graduated 7 MS and 22 PhD degrees, and its graduates have published more than 260 HIV publications. The new training program in HIV translational science and research methods is expected to produce similar results.
