Course

Stella Safo, MD, MPH, AAHIVS is a board-certified HIV primary care physician, public health advocate, and the founder of Just Equity for Health, a health care improvement company that uses advocacy, education and care model design to ensure equitable care delivery across all sectors of medicine. Dr. Safo has experience in clinical transformation and health care redesign at Mount Sinai Health System and Premier Inc, where she respectively serves as an Assistant Professor and Strategic Advisor. In addition to her commitment to population health and care model design, Dr. Safo is dedicated to equity within health care. She is a founding member of several organizations dedicated to gender and racial equity and to civic engagement in medicine, including Equity Now at Mount Sinai, Civic Health Alliance and the Coalition to Advance Antiracism in Medicine.

Antonio E. Urbina, MD is the Medical Director for the Mt. Sinai Institute for Advanced Medicine Downtown clinic in New York City. Dr. Urbina serves as a Medical Director for the Clinical Education Initiative of the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute as well as Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Since completing his residency in Internal Medicine at Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Center-Manhattan in 1995, Dr. Urbina has pioneered innovative educational programming for community-based clinics, hospitals, and public health departments. He has directed more than 10 HIV clinical trials research protocols. From 2007 to 2009, Dr. Urbina served on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) as well as Governor Cuomo’s Task Force to end the AIDS epidemic in New York State.

Rona Vail, MD is an HIV specialist providing medical care to HIV-infected individuals for over 30 years. She has been at the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center for the past 20 years, where in addition to patient care, she has provided education and training on HIV to community members, students, residents and medical professionals. She also serves on the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute Medical Care Criteria Guidelines Committee, as well as the Quality of Care Committee.

Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH, is a Professor of Medicine and Associate Chief in the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is also the Director of the UCSF Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) and the Medical Director of the HIV Clinic ("Ward 86") at San Francisco General Hospital. Her research focuses on HIV treatment and prevention optimization, HIV and women, adherence measurement in HIV and TB, adherence interventions, and the interplay between COVID-19 and HIV. She recently worked on COVID-19 mitigation and vaccination strategies, with a book on the COVID-19 pandemic (called “Endemic: A Post Pandemic Playbook”) coming out from Mayo Clinic Press in 2023.

Robert Pitts, MD is currently the Medical Director for the LGBTQ Pride Center at Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, responsible for the care of over four hundred patients, delivering comprehensive gender affirming services for New Yorkers regardless of ability to pay or county of origin. He is the co-investigator of a newly launched initiative called “EquiPrEP”, which is centered on equity to address social determinants of health while simultaneously rolling-out long-acting injectable PrEP among priority populations at risk for HIV in a NYC safety-net hospital. Dr. Pitts is a founding member on the Health + Hospital (H+H) Pride Council, responsible for maintaining excellent gender affirming care across the H+H system, with 7 Pride Centers in 3 NYC boroughs.

Mitchell Warren as been the Executive Director of AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition since 2004, an international non-profit organization that uses education, policy analysis, advocacy, and a network of global collaborations to accelerate the ethical development and global delivery of new and emerging HIV prevention options as part of a comprehensive and integrated pathway to global health equity. He is a member of many boards and committees, including the PEPFAR Scientific Advisory Board, the International AIDS Society Governing Council, and the IAS Towards an HIV Cure Initiative; co-chair of the Global HIV Prevention Coalition; president of the TB Alliance Stakeholder Association; and past president of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise. Mitchell has degrees in English and History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and studied health policy at Johns Hopkins University.

Marina Caskey, MD is a Professor of Clinical Investigation at The Rockefeller University. Her work focuses on the development and clinical evaluation of novel immunotherapeutic strategies against infectious diseases, with a special emphasis on HIV. Dr. Caskey has led a series of early-phase clinical studies to evaluate the safety and efficacy of broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibodies. These studies have revitalized this area of HIV research, which had been abandoned after first-generation antibodies failed to show significant effects in humans. Broadly neutralizing antibodies are now considered one of the most promising strategies to achieve HIV remission, as well as potential alternatives to antiretrovirals for both therapy and prevention. Dr. Caskey is also an attending physician in infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine Center and an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation.