Ending AIDS: All Hands on Deck

Excerpt

This special issue of AIDS and Behavior presents a series of scientific papers written by a remarkable group of early career investigators from low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) across the globe. More impressive still, these investigators—which include gay men, other men who have sex with men, and transgender individuals (GMT)—often come from settings that routinely discount their very existence and value as people, and in which repression, discrimination and violence are the bywords of their daily lives. Their ability to conduct community-focused HIV research within such settings, and then produce and publish papers in a respected scientific journal is a profound testament to the courage, commitment and hard work that each of these investigators brought to the innovative initiative—the HIV Scholars Program—profiled in this publication. This program is the result of an ambitious partnership between the Center for LGBT Health Research at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, and amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, but it is the scholars themselves who are its heart and soul, and upon whom its success has been built. The impressive work of these community-based researchers demonstrates that with relatively modest investments in training, mentorship and pilot funding, investigators from LMIC can formulate innovative scientific questions of significant public health importance, develop rigorous, context-relevant research protocols and funding proposals, conduct the research necessary to study these questions, analyze and publish the results of their studies, and in the process advance our understanding of HIV prevention science for GMT populations in LMIC settings. …