Weill Cornell Professor Presented with Lifetime Achievement for HIV/AIDS Research
Dr. Roy Gulick, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine and professor of Medicine, received a "Lifetime Achievement Award for His Invaluable Contribution in the Field of HIV Medicine, Medical Education and Research," at the 2012 HIV Congress in Mumbai, India.
Dr. Roy Gulick, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine and professor of Medicine
The HIV Congress is an annual gathering of the top international scholars, researchers and physicians in HIV/AIDS.
"It has been a privilege to have played a part in the research, clinical care, and education that led to the dramatic improvement in the lives of people with HIV. To be recognized for it, particularly by my international colleagues, means the world to me," said Dr. Gulick. "This was my first visit to India and it was a true honor to accept the award and address the conference delegates."
Early on in his medical career, Dr. Gulick focused on infectious diseases, specifically HIV/AIDS research and antiretroviral therapies for HIV infection. He is currently the principal investigator of the National Institutes of Health-funded Cornell HIV Clinical Trials Unit and a member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services HIV Treatment Guidelines panel. Dr. Gulick acknowledges that the treatment of AIDS has come a long way.
"When I was a medical student and resident in the 1980s, the average life expectancy for someone with AIDS was 4 to 6 months; today someone with HIV infection who is treated appropriately can expect to live into their 70s — close to a normal life span," said Dr. Gulick. However, about 50,000 Americans still are newly infected with HIV each year — and that hasn't changed for the last 20 years. As a result, my research interests have turned to HIV prevention. A new prevention strategy called pre-exposure prophylaxis involves giving HIV medications to at-risk HIV-negative individuals to prevent them from acquiring the infection."
Dr. Gulick is currently the chair of pre-exposure prophylaxis study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health-funded HIV Prevention Trials Network that will test new pre-exposure phophylaxis regimens in 400 participants here at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center and 11 other sites across the United States and Puerto Rico. They hope to start the study enrollment later this month.
Dr. Gulick serves on multiple boards and panels related to AIDS/HIV prevention and treatment and previously served as chairman of the Antiviral Drugs Advisory Committee of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and as co-chairman of the Forum for Collaborative HIV Research.
Additional Awards and Honors
Jesse Bastiaens, a member of Weill Cornell Medical College's Class of 2014, was chosen to present the research he conducted with Dr. Sheila Nirenberg, an associate professor of Physiology and Biophysics and associate professor of Computational Neuroscience in Computational Biomedicine, on impulse control disorders in Parkinson's disease during the American Academy of Neurology's annual meeting April 26 in New Orleans, La. Bastiaens' presentation was included in the Academy's "Highlights in the Field," portion of the meeting. He was the only medical student to receive that honor.
Julia Krout, an assistant manager of specialized care at Weill Cornell Medical College and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, received second place in the institution category of the Tribranch Conference Poster Session for her poster "Refinement of Zebrafish Feeding and the Subsequent Reduction of System Waste." The Tribranch symposium, hosted June 11-13 in Atlantic City, N.J., brought members of the metro New York, New Jersey and Delaware Valley branches of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science together.