This summer, I worked with the Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute Partnership (BHP) in Gaborone, Botswana, a collaboration between the Botswana Ministry of Health and Wellness and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health dedicated to scientific research in a myriad of disciplines relevant to the AIDS epidemic in Botswana and southern Africa. At the heart of BHP's mission is a collaborative approach to conducting clinical and laboratory-based research, with an emphasis on training and building local capacity. My project involves estimating cross-sectional HIV incidence in six communities from the Botswana Combination Prevention Project (BCPP) , a large clinical trial in Botswana with the ultimate goal of monitoring the success of a newly implemented treatment-as-prevention program on communities with high incidence of HIV-1C, the most common subtype of HIV in Botswana. Using new samples from the BCPP end-of-study survey, I intend to determine infection recency using a limiting antigen assay, and characterize the incidence of HIV-1C in these programs with this complete look at the multi-year trial.
