Dr. Elizabeth Connick Wins National Women’s Health Award for HIV/AIDS Research, Advocacy

Elizabeth Connick, MD, professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson and chief and fellowship program director of the Division of Infectious Diseases, has received the 2020 Constance B. Wofsy Women’s Health Award. The annual honor by the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) recognizes someone who exemplifies the mission of mentoring junior investigators, caring for women with HIV, and performing research related to the care of women and girls living with HIV.

Image

“It is the greatest honor of my life,” Dr. Connick said. “Constance Wofsy was an amazing person. She was one of those people who jumped in to treat people with AIDS very early in the epidemic in San Francisco, and one of the first to recognize that HIV affected women.”

The AIDS Clinical Trials Group conducts a wide range of studies for people living with HIV, as the largest network of expert clinical and translational investigators and therapeutic clinical trials units in the world.

Dr. Connick, who joined the College of Medicine – Tucson faculty in 2016, is an immunologist best known for her work studying HIV in lymphoid tissues.

“There’s an area in the lymphoid tissue where most HIV replication is concentrated,” Dr. Connick said. “We found that the CD8 killer T cells don’t penetrate that area well – it is a semi-immune privileged site that may be one of the barriers to controlling HIV infection.”

Dr. Connick also has investigated sex differences in HIV replication in secondary lymphoid tissues, and discovered that women had fewer virus-producing cells in their lymphoid tissues than men. She has played a key role in clinical research on women living with HIV. She was senior author on a study demonstrating that female sex, Black race and residence in the South were associated with HIV disease progression, underscoring the fact that social inequities in addition to biological differences play a key role in HIV-related morbidity and mortality.

Dr. Connick earned her medical degree from Harvard Medical School, did her residency training at New York City’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and her fellowship training in infectious diseases at the University of Colorado Denver, where she was on the faculty for more than two decades before coming to the University of Arizona. Dr. Connick said she was drawn to Tucson in part due to the robust HIV/AIDS clinical care program offered through the UArizona Petersen HIV Clinics, now in their fourth decade. The Petersen HIV Clinics and Arizona AIDS Education and Training Center, also operated through her division, were awarded the Peter Likins Program Inclusive Excellence Awards last summer by the University of Arizona Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

Dr. Connick has served on multiple national committees related to HIV care and research, including as chair of the NIH’s AIDS Immunology and Pathogenesis study section, as a member of the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council at the NIH, and a member of the FDA’s Antiviral Drug Advisory Committee. Dr. Connick also is a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and scientific advisory board member of the Women’s Research Initiative on HIV/AIDS. She also serves on multiple editorial boards, including for the Journal of AIDS, Healio Infectious Disease News and Journal of the International AIDS Society. Her laboratory has received sustained NIH funding for the past 22 years.