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Jennifer Furin, MD, PhD, is an anthropologist and infectious diseases specialist with expertise in the treatment of HIV, tuberculosis (TB) and multi drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) in resource-poor settings. She currently serves as the Medical Director for Partners In Health’s (PIH) program in Lesotho and as an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Furin has been an Associate Physician at the Division of Global Health Equity, Brigham and Women’s Hospital since 2004, and from 2005-2006 she was Director of the Global Health Equity Residency Program. Dr. Furin has also worked at PIH sites in Haiti, Peru, and Russia.
Under Dr. Furin’s guidance, PIH expanded to Lesotho - an impoverished nation located in southern Africa in which nearly a third of the population has HIV - in 2006. Since entering the country at the request of the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, PIH Lesotho (PIHL) has rehabilitated six rural health centers with infrastructure improvements, essential medicines, supplies and equipment, and additional staffing and training to provide improved health services in a catchment area of more than 150,000 people. In just over two years, the PIHL program has tested more than 18,000 patients for HIV, is following over 5,000 HIV positive patients, and has enrolled almost 3,000 patients in anti-retroviral treatment. In 2007, PIHL launched a national, community-based MDR-TB program in Lesotho that serves all ten districts in the country and has enrolled 183 patients, 68% of whom are HIV co-infected.
An expert on the social roots of infectious disease, Dr. Furin conducts training, consultation and research on the application of qualitative and ethnographic methods to management of complex health interventions in resource-poor settings. Dr. Furin is responsible for the design and oversight of several ethnographic studies relating to systems and scale-up in community-based management of HIV, TB, and MDR-TB.
Dr. Furin received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California and her MD from Harvard Medical School. She completed an Internal Medicine residency at the Brigham, followed by advanced training in Infectious Diseases at Case Western Reserve University. She divides her time between her field work at the clinics in Lesotho and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. For her dedication to treating the diseases of the poor, Dr. Furin received the Howard Hiatt Award in Social Medicine and Health Equity in 2007.
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This page was last modified on 12/19/2008
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