The Medical College of Wisconsin’s Center for AIDS Intervention Research has received a five-year, $8.7 million grant renewal from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health, which will fund its programs through its 25th year of existence.
CAIR is one of six federally-supported HIV prevention research centers in the United States and the only center located between the country’s East and West Coasts. The funding will provide core infrastructure needed to establish a foundation for the center’s initiatives over the next five years.
“CAIR’s mission is the development and conduct of interventions to prevent HIV infections in populations vulnerable to the disease, the conduct of interventions to alleviate adverse health outcomes among persons living with HIV infection, and the dissemination of center research findings to the field so that both the scientific and public health communities can directly benefit from results of the research,” said Jeffrey Kelly, Ph.D.
A professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at MCW, Kelly has served as CAIR’s director since its inception, and is the principal investigator of the center.
The Center’s research team includes 12 faculty investigators, all of whom devote their full effort to HIV prevention research and all of whom hold primary appointments in MCW’s department of psychiatry and behavioral medicine. Additionally, there are 33 affiliated investigators from other MCW departments and institutions who participate in CAIR research, 25 full-time research and administrative staff, and a cadre of post-doctoral fellows and graduate students.
“Together, CAIR’s interdisciplinary team brings diverse perspectives and expertise to Center research drawn from psychology and the behavioral sciences, sociology, anthropology, infectious disease medicine, biostatistics, the law, nursing, community and public health, and other fields,” Kelly said.
CAIR’s achievements include: the publication of nearly 900 articles by CAIR investigators appearing in the field’s leading scientific journals; the award of over $147 million in total NIH and CDC federal research grants to CAIR investigators at MCW; and the training of 24 postdoctoral research fellows in CAIR’s NIMH-supported two-year T32 training program.
Although much of CAIR’s research is undertaken in Wisconsin, CAIR investigators lead HIV prevention research initiatives throughout the country and the world. Nearly 30 percent of CAIR’s research is international in scope, including HIV prevention studies undertaken in the post-Soviet countries of Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa.
