AIDS and Tuberculosis: A Deadly Liaison

Stefan H.E. Kaufmann is the Director of the Department of Immunology at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany. Having obtained his academic degrees from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz he spent his time as post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology and later became full Professor for Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Ulm. Professor Kaufmann has authored over 600 scientific publications and has received numerous scientific awards including the Aronson Prize of the State of Berlin, the Smith Kline Beecham Science Prize for Medical Research, the Merckle Research Prize, The Robert Pfleger Prize, The Pettenkofer Prize, The Research Prize of the German Society for Hygiene and Microbiology and the Alfred Krupp Prize for Young Professors. He is also member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Leopoldina Academy of Natural Sciences and a long-time Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Microbes and Infection.

Dr. Walker is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Center for AIDS Research at Harvard University; Director of the Partners AIDS Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital; and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He obtained his undergraduate training at the University of Colorado and the Swiss Federal Technical Institute, and graduated from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Following an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in infectious diseases in the laboratory of Dr. Robert T. Schooley, studying the cellular immune response to HIV in infected persons. He now spends the majority of his time in the laboratory studying immune responses in chronic viral infections. His basic science research focuses on cellular immune responses to HIV and hepatitis C virus (HCV). Dr. Walker also continues his work as a clinician with a specialty is infectious disease, focusing on the treatment of persons with HIV/AIDS. In addition, he has been involved in collaborative research in Africa at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, where he helped to establish a state of the art AIDS Research Center to serve sub-Saharan Africa.