The George R. Seage III Early Career Investigator Award

The George R. Seage III PHACS Early Career Investigator Mentored Research Award supports the development of Early Career Investigators to enter the field of maternal/child, adolescent, or young adult HIV research while advancing the mission of the PHACS network. Read about awardees and their work below.

Applications are currently CLOSED for this award.

Sigrid Collier MD, MPH

Acting Assistant Professor

Department of Dermatology

University of Washington
2024 Awardee

Dr. Sigrid Collier is a dermatologist and Acting Assistant Professor in the Department of Dermatology at the University of Washington. Dr. Collier received her medical degree and MPH from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. She then completed a dual residency program in internal medicine and dermatology at the University of Minnesota. Following residency, she participated in a Fogarty post-doctoral global health research fellowship focused on improving linkage to care for people with HIV-associated Kaposi's sarcoma as part of the Northern Pacific Global Health Research Fellows Training Consortium.

Her research focuses on understanding and addressing the burden and impact of skin disease among people living with HIV and other underserved populations in the United States and around the world. Her ECI award will focus on understanding the impact of atopic dermatitis on quality of life and mental health outcomes among youth living with perinatally acquired HIV. It will also investigate the ways in which social and structural determinants of health contribute to the burden of atopic dermatitis among youth living with perinatally acquired HIV.

Click here for Dr. Collier's bio...>>

Lisa Mash, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Pediatric Neuropsychologist
Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago
2024 Awardee

Dr. Mash is a pediatric neuropsychologist at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She received her PhD in Clinical Psychology in 2021 and went on to complete two years of postdoctoral training in pediatric neuropsychology at Texas Children's Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Mash conducts comprehensive neuropsychological evaluations with children referred from various specialties, including infectious disease, neurology, genetics, and hematology/oncology. She has previously led research examining biological underpinnings and cognitive sequelae of developmental disorders and pediatric brain tumors.

Dr. Mash's current research focuses on predictors of long-term cognitive outcomes and wellbeing in children impacted by HIV within PHACS. Her ECI award will investigate the influences of maternal inflammation and biological aging during pregnancy on early development in HIV-exposed, uninfected one-year-olds. This project will also examine potential effects of ART on maternal biological aging. She is thrilled to have joined PHACS this year, and is excited to carry out this important work.

Click here for Dr. Mash's bio...>>

Ravi Kumar Alluri, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Genomic Medicine
Lerner Research Institute
Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio
2023 Awardee

Dr. Alluri is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Genomic Medicine, Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute, in Cleveland, Ohio, working under the mentorship of Asha Kallianpur, MD, MPH. He received his PhD degree in Integrative Biology from Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida. Dr. Alluri’s recent research has focused on studying the role of iron dysregulation, as reflected by iron biomarkers, in neurocognitive impairment in adults living with HIV. He will now expand this research to involve children and adolescents living with HIV (CALWH), in whom iron plays a vital role in early brain development, and in whom iron dysregulation may have an even more critical and long-lasting impact on neurocognitive and neurobehavioral outcomes. Under the mentorship of Dr. Kallianpur, he is the recipient of the 2023 George R. Seage, III PHACS Early Career Investigator award. This ECI award aims to uncover novel associations of HIV- and antiretroviral-related changes in iron homeostasis with cognitive and neurobehavioral health outcomes in CALWH. Findings from this study may provide a rationale for new, iron-modulating strategies to prevent or treat these complications in CALWH, with the ultimate goal of improving care for this population.

Megan S. McHenry

Megan S. McHenry, MD, MS, FAAP
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Director of Pediatric Global Health Education
Co-Director of the Morris Green Physician Scientist Development Program
Indiana University School of Medicine
2021 Awardee

Dr. Megan S. McHenry is a pediatrician and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Ryan White Center for Pediatric Infectious Disease and Global Health at Indiana University School of Medicine. Dr. McHenry's research focuses on early childhood development in children living in low-resourced settings. She primarily conducts research in collaboration with the Academic Model for Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH) Research Network in Kenya, where she is completing an NIH-funded career development award on neurodevelopment in children affected by HIV. Her passion to improve outcomes for this population has led her to join the PHACS Mental Health, Neurodevelopment, and Neurologic Conditions Working Group, where she developed her Early Career Investigator Award proposal. Her ECI award will focus on understanding the potential relationships among early adversity, inflammation, and cognitive outcomes in young adults living with perinatal HIV infection.

Click here for Dr. McHenry's bio...>>

Dr. Sahera Dirajlal-Fargo

Sahera Dirajlal-Fargo, DO, MS
Assistant Professor
Case Western Reserve School of Medicine
2019 Awardee

Dr. Sahera Dirajlal-Fargo is a pediatric infectious disease expert at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor in pediatrics at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. She has worked with the Baylor Pediatric AIDS Initiative in several African countries and obtained her pediatric infectious disease training at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on non-infections complications of HIV in children and youth in the US and sub-Saharan Africa. She is specifically interested in cardio-metabolic complications and the links with inflammation, immune activation and gut integrity.

Her PHACS early career award is exploring the relationship between GI-barrier disruption and microbial translocation (“leaky gut”) and metabolic complications specifically focusing on adiposity in youth living with HIV within PHACS. In this application, we propose to leverage the highly established research infrastructure within PHACS and utilize repository specimens from a large pediatric cohort to study, for the first time in the setting of well-phenotyped youth living with perinatally acquired HIV, the interplay between body composition, intestinal integrity/microbial translocation and metabolic complications. These results will expand our understanding of the pathogenesis and the role of adiposity and may reveal novel pathways which could inform future prevention strategies against cardiometabolic outcomes in these youth.

Click here for Dr. Dirajlal-Fargo's bio...>>

Dr. Stephanie Shiau

Stephanie Shiau, PhD, MPH
Instructor
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
Rutgers School of Public Health
2019 Awardee

Dr. Stephanie Shiau is an Instructor in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology in the Rutgers School of Public Health. She received a PhD and an MPH in Epidemiology from Columbia University and a BA in Public Health Studies from The Johns Hopkins University. After graduate school, she completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center at Columbia University. Currently, she is a scholar in the UCSD Sustained Training in Aging & HIV Research (STAHR) Program (R25MH108389). Dr. Shiau’s interdisciplinary research program focuses on the effects of HIV and its treatment over the life course, seeking to identify modifiable factors that influence trajectories of HIV-associated non-AIDS (HANA) conditions in children, adolescents, and adults living with HIV and affected by HIV. Her work integrates epidemiologic tools, imaging assessments, and laboratory biomarkers, including assays to measure epigenetic markers.

Dr. Shiau’s PHACS Early Career Investigator Award is focused on studying the influence of maternal inflammatory mechanisms during pregnancy in women living with HIV on growth outcomes in their HIV-exposed uninfected (HEU) infants.

Click for Dr. Shiau's bio...>>

Dr. Engi Attia

Engi F. Attia, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor
Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine
University of Washington School of Medicine
2017 Awardee

Dr. Engi Attia received her medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and completed her Fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and a Master’s in Public Health at the University of Washington. Engi’s research interests involve the intersection of chronic lung disease, HIV infection and global health. Her research program is currently focused on examining the prevalence, risk factors and pathophysiologic mechanisms of chronic lung diseases in youth living with HIV at the Coptic Hope Center for Infectious Diseases in Nairobi, Kenya. This work is supported by a K23 (HL129888) Career Development Award from the NIH National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. She was awarded the inaugural PHACS Early Career Award to expand this work to examine differences in prevalence, subtypes, risk factors and mechanisms of obstructive lung disease among youth living with perinatally-acquired HIV and HIV-uninfected youth in PHACS and the ongoing Kenyan K23-funded study. In preliminary analyses, Engi and colleagues found that immune imbalance and immune activation were associated with lower lung function in youth living with perinatally-acquired HIV in the U.S. and Kenya, and that immune imbalance and growth deficits were more specifically associated with obstructive lung disease. Engi is also studying the impact of air pollution exposure on chronic lung diseases in youth living with HIV and uninfected youth in Nairobi, supported by the University of Washington Center for AIDS Research New Investigator Award.

Click for Dr. Attia's bio...>>

The George R. Seage III Early Career Investigator Award

Introducing the PHACS Member Area (BETA)