Using creativity to prevent new HIV infections in Africa
Kenneth is an emerging global leader who is already making huge contributions to health in Africa and worldwide. Originally from Uganda, where he completed medical school and began a career as a research study physician, Kenneth pursued a PhD to explore unanswered questions about the safety of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a daily pill for HIV prevention. For his dissertation, he led cutting-edge studies to quantify the risk and safety of PrEP use by African men and women, which informed guidelines for clinical practice to accelerate the delivery of PrEP to fight the global HIV epidemic.
His dissertation was published in several high-impact journals and awarded the UW Graduate School’s Distinguished Dissertation Award, a prestigious award recognizing outstanding scholarship and research at the doctoral level. Only one award is given every year in the Biologic and Life Sciences category across the entire university. Additionally, his findings changed international perspectives and policies. Now, as a faculty member at UW SPH, Kenneth leads several large PrEP studies in Kenya to scale up PrEP nationally in HIV care clinics and to integrate PrEP delivery in antenatal care and family planning clinics.
Affiliations: Assistant Professor, Department of Global Health, UW Schools of Public Health and Medicine; HIVR4P New Investigator Award recipient