In addition to its recent Microgrant, the UNC CFAR Developmental Core has released its 2022-2023 RFP and a CFAR Notice of Special Interest (NOSI): Request for Proposals of HIV/COVID-19 Small Grants. Letters of intent for these proposals are due no later than Wednesday, December 1, 2021.  All current Developmental Core funding opportunities are linked below. Microgrant (Rolling Deadline) Traditional RFP Contact the CFAR Developmental Core during application preparation for a telephone or email conversation to verify eligibility and briefly describe research idea Letter of Intent Due Date: Wednesday, December 1, 2021 Application Due Date: Friday, January 7, 2022 CFAR Scientific Review: February 2022 Notification of Award: early March 2022 Actual start date may be delayed if required approvals are delayed; see below. Period of Award: Funding expires on July 31, 2023, however, we ask that you spend as much of your funds as possible by July 31, 2022. HIV/COVID-19 NOSI

Alicia Diggs has been living with HIV for 20 of her 49 years, and she’s made good use of every year. Not only is she an author, a PhD, and a fierce advocate for people living with HIV, she’s also a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, the manager for the Office of Community Engagement for the North Carolina-Chapel Hill Center for AIDS Research, and a member of many other HIV support organizations. “Through my trials and tribulations, I made a decision to fight and stand strong as a woman living with HIV so that I can help my fellow brothers and sisters fight and stand strong,” she says about her decision to be a leader in her community. “It has been important to me to help build coalitions and solidarity within and amongst our diverse communities to that we can dispel the myths, rid the stigma, and

“The National Institutes of Health will award $53 million annually to 10 research organizations over the next five years to continue working toward curative therapies for HIV. The Collaboratory of AIDS Researchers for Eradication (CARE), led at the UNC HIV Cure Center by David Margolis, MD, is one of two programs to have received funds for all three five-year grant cycles since 2011.” This story was originally published by the UNC Health and UNC School of Medicine Newsroom on August 17, 2021 – read more here.

“HIV-related mortality has decreased since 1996 due to improving treatments and evolving care guidelines, but the extent to which persons entering HIV care have a higher risk for death over the following years, compared with peers in the general population, has been unclear. Joseph Eron, MD, the Herman and Louise Smith Distinguished Professor of Medicine and chief of the division of infectious diseases, was the senior investigator on this novel observational study that advances the understanding of trends in mortality in the years after entering HIV care, compared with the general US population, published recently in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The study was led by Jessie K. Edwards, PhD, assistant professor in the department of epidemiology, and utilized 13 sites from the North American AIDS Cohort Collaboration on Research and Design. Participants included 82,766 adults entering HIV clinical care between 1999 and 2017, and a subset of the US population, matched on calendar time, age,

UNC School of Medicine Dean Wesley Burks named Infectious Diseases Chief Joseph Eron, Jr., MD, the Herman and Louise Smith Distinguished Professor of Medicine on March 10, 2021. The honor acknowledges his decades-long commitment to infectious diseases along with his work this past year during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are honored to work with Dr. Eron, our CFAR Clinical Core Director!

Michael Hudgens, UNC CFAR Biostatistics Core Director, is the new Associate Chair of the Biostatistics Department! Dr. Hudgens joins Lisa LaVange, Department Chair, and brings many years of experience to UNC’s top-ranked biostatistics department. Hudgens has co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in statistical journals such as Biometrics, Biometrika, JASA and JRSS-B as well as biomedical journals such as the Lancet, Nature and New England Journal of Medicine. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for Biometrics, JASA and JRSS-B. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and has taught graduate level biostatistics courses at UNC for over ten years. Congratulations!

UNC HIV researchers were featured in a recent Nature article titled, “Viruses, microscopy and fast radio bursts: 10 remarkable discoveries from 2020.” A study on HIV latency reversal from J. Victor Garcia, PhD, David Margolis, MD, and team (with Qura Therapeutics and Emory University) is listed as one of the 10 most remarkable discoveries of 2020! Read more at the UNC Health and UNC School of Medicine Newsroom here.