Keynote Speaker

Ruanne V Barnabas MBChB, DPhil

Dr. Barnabas was born in Durban, South Africa. She attended medical school in South Africa, and witnessed the growth of the AIDS epidemic there first hand. She received her MD cum laude from the University of Cape Town. After completing her medical training in South Africa she was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford, where she received her MSc (Epidemiology) with distinction and DPhil (Medicine). Currently, she is Acting Clinical Instructor in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington.

In trying to understand why the virus disproportionately infects so many people in Sub-Saharan Africa, Barnabas, and other collaborators are focusing on how HIV interacts with other infectious diseases that are also highly prevalent in those countries.

The ultimate goal of this research is to decrease the burden of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa. She hopes to initiate trials in the next few years to examine whether treating co-infections such as malaria will reduce HIV viral loads and thus help dampen HIV transmission in areas with high levels of co-infections.

“Working as a junior doctor in South Africa was really eye opening because we saw many of the complications of HIV for the first time. It was a formative experience because you think there’s something that you must be able to do to stop people from getting infected in the first place,” she said. “It certainly made its stamp early on – that this was a field that I wanted to be active in and do research in.”