Jessica Elise Justman, MD

As an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist, Dr. Jessica Justman has worked for over two decades to advance HIV prevention, care, and treatment and to pioneer a precision approach to understanding the global HIV epidemic.

She is Senior Technical Director at ICAP, a global public health center at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. In this role, she oversees the development and strengthening of ICAP's clinical, laboratory, strategic information and survey activities across a range of global projects.

As a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, Dr. Justman's research interests focus on HIV prevention and HIV epidemiology. Dr. Justman's HIV prevention research began over 20 years ago when she was the founding site leader for the NIH-funded Bronx Prevention Center clinical research site. The Bronx site, along with the Harlem Prevention Center and the Eswatini Prevention Center, is part of the ICAP at Columbia Clinical Trials Unit, for which Dr. Justman serves as co-principal investigator. These research sites have helped to conduct a wide range of HIV prevention research, including studies on injectable PrEP. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Dr. Justman applied lessons from HIV programs and research to a wide range of COVID-19 activities, including COVID-19 surveys, vaccine trials, and early treatment trials.

Beginning in 2014, she spearheaded the PEPFAR-funded Population-based HIV Impact Assessment (PHIA) Project’s nationally representative surveys which have measured access to care and treatment and, by using novel HIV recency assays, HIV incidence in 20 African and Caribbean countries. Results from the PHIA surveys have transformed global HIV programming by highlighting the need for more effective and targeted HIV testing approaches. Dr. Justman was also principal investigator of the TRACE initiative, a technical assistance program supported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that helps ministries of health use HIV recency testing to strengthen the precision of HIV infection surveillance systems and guide HIV prevention programs.