Richard Kaslow, MD, MPH

During his decades-long career at CDC, NIH, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Dr. Kaslow has organized and collaborated on initiatives spanning a wide spectrum of conditions. Early research topics included healthcare-associated infections, Lyme disease, infections in pregnancy, and autoimmune diseases such as reactive arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus. When HIV/AIDS was first recognized, he initiated and guided the NIH-funded Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study; it has operated for more than 35 years, continuing to produce a wealth of information about nearly every aspect of HIV infection. In that context he began to explore the role of host genetics in the acquisition and progression of HIV infection. Subsequently, as Director of the UAB Program in Epidemiology of Infection and Immunity, Dr. Kaslow continued pursuing that line of inquiry in a number of other US and African cohorts. The investigative teams he led or joined made groundbreaking discoveries about polymorphisms in genes encoding HLA, chemokine receptor, and other molecules exert critical differential control of the cell-mediated response to HIV. This approach was then extended in work by him and others documenting contributions of HLA to the variable responses made to other infections as well as vaccines (e.g., for HIV, hepatitis B and anthrax). At the Department of Veterans Affairs, he supervised population level research on control of infectious disease, including the initiative requiring influenza vaccination of healthcare personnel. Dr. Kaslow is currently editing the 6^th edition of the widely consulted textbook, Viral Infections of Humans.