Internal Medicine near Mount Vernon, NY

Biography: As an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist, Dr. Jessica Justman has worked for over two decades to advance HIV prevention, care, and treatment and to pioneer a precision approach to understanding the global HIV epidemic. She is Senior Technical Director at ICAP, a global public health center at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. In this role, she oversees the development and strengthening of ICAP's clinical, laboratory, strategic information and survey activities across a range of global projects. As a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, Dr. Justman's research interests focus on HIV prevention and HIV epidemiology. Dr. Justman's HIV prevention research began over 20 years ago when she was the founding site leader for the NIH-funded Bronx Prevention Center clinical research site. The Bronx site, along with the Harlem Prevention Center and the Eswatini Prevention Center, is part of the ICAP at Columbia Clinical Trials Unit, for which Dr. Justman serves as co-principal investigator. These research sites have helped to conduct a wide range of HIV prevention research, including studies on injectable PrEP. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Dr. Justman applied lessons from HIV programs and research to a wide range of COVID-19 activities, including COVID-19 surveys, vaccine trials, and early treatment trials. Beginning in 2014, she spearheaded the PEPFAR-funded Population-based HIV Impact Assessment (PHIA) Project's nationally representative surveys which have measured access to care and treatment and, by using novel HIV recency assays, HIV incidence in 20 African and Caribbean countries. Results from the PHIA surveys have transformed global HIV programming by highlighting the need for more effective and targeted HIV testing approaches. Dr. Justman was also principal investigator of the TRACE initiative, a technical assistance program supported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that helps ministries of health use HIV recency testing to strengthen the precision of HIV infection surveillance systems and guide HIV prevention programs.

Biography: During my years as a clinician educator in the HIV program and Infectious Disease division, I directed a variety of healthcare capacity building efforts. These included the upper Manhattan Clinical Education Initiative, a NYS DOHMH AIDS Institute sponsored HIV educational initiative that targeted community-based physicians, nurses and physician assistants (1995-2003) and the Nicholas A. Rango HIV Scholars Program, a post graduate training program focused on ambulatory HIV care (1998-2010). I directed quality improvement efforts for the Columbia University Irving Medical Center HIV program and used QI methodology to expand HIV testing, initiate HIV testing in the Emergency Department (using NYC DOH grant funding), and institute point-of-care testing to ambulatory sites throughout New York-Presbyterian Medical Center. I was elected to the Glenda Garvey/Virginia Apgar Academy of Outstanding Medical Educators, directed global health training for the Internal Medicine residency program at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and served as Chief of Service for the NYPH inpatient Infectious Diseases service. In 2009, I had the opportunity to teach at the Infectious Diseases Institute in Kampala, Uganda. Later, I worked on curriculum development for the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI) collaboration between the Columbia University ID division and Nelson Mandela School of Medicine in Durban, South Africa. These experiences engaged my desire to work on a broader, and more scientific and more international, basis. In 2018, I realized the opportunity to expand my focus on HIV treatment to an international scale and to step more definitively into the era of HIV prevention. I moved to a position in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University ICAP program. I am currently an Adult Care and Treatment specialist providing support for HIV care and treatment capacity building efforts in Ukraine, Central Asia, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic, and serving as a co-investigator on studies of HIV prevention at the Bronx Prevention Center. .

Biography: Benjamin Miko is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. He specializes in the management of opportunistic infections among immunocompromised individuals as well as the treatment of MRSA infections and HIV/AIDS. His past research has focused on the transmission of antimicrobial resistant pathogens among incarcerated individuals. Miko serves as the Program Director of the Infectious Diseases Fellowship and the Section Director of the Microbiology/Infectious Diseases Course for pre-clinical medical students at Columbia. Miko holds an MD from Boston University, an MSc in Biostatistics from Columbia University, and a Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (DTM&H) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (University of London, UK). He completed Internal Medicine Residency and Infectious Diseases Fellowship at Columbia University Medical Center, where he also served as a post-doctoral research fellow with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research to Reduce Antimicrobial Resistance. He joined the faculty of the Division of Infectious Diseases in 2013.Miko is an Associate Editor of the journal "Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene" (Oxford University Press). He is certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and the Royal College of Physicians of London. He serves on the Item-Writing Task Force for the US Infectious Diseases Board Certification Exam (ABIM) and isanelected Councilor for the Infectious Diseases Society of New York. Miko is an associate member of Chatham House (The Royal Institute of International Affairs) and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.