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Elizabeth Glaser Scientist Award for work on the HIV infection
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/dome/0505/feature4.cfmPersaud was a medical student at NYU in 1985 when the first cases of HIV were being identified in young, gay men. During her residency at Columbia Presbyterian, she started seeing infants presenting with the same type of pneumonia. “It was actually devastating because an infected infant meant an infected mother, father and, possibly, other siblings. Eighty percent of these infants died in the first year of life, and we could do nothing. We had no therapies.”
Today, 20 years later, HIV infection has been transformed into a preventable, treatable disease in children, and Persaud now is studying the virus at the single-cell level. “I’ve been fortunate to have witnessed the beginning of the epidemic and the multiple phases of HIV infection. It’s been transformed into a chronic infection. What I hope for the future is to be able to see a similar transformation in resource-poor settings.”
When she won the Glaser award, Persaud was hailed as “one of the best and brightest AIDS researchers in the field today.” To get to this point, she has overcome incredible odds. Until she was 16, she lived in Guyana, a South American country on the Atlantic coast. Her parents had divorced, and when she was 10, her mother went to America to find work. Six years later, Persaud and her three siblings joined her in Brooklyn, N.Y.—in the battered neighborhood of Bushwick. After Persaud completed high school and college, just one medical school, NYU, accepted her. That was all she needed to get on a career trajectory that would consistently put her precisely in the right place at the right time.
It was not until the prestigious Glaser award was formally announced on Feb. 23 at a research conference in Boston that its full import sank in. Looking around at the roomful of notable scientists, Persaud felt as though she really belonged. “That is when I realized that I actually had impacted pediatric HIV in this country.”
