Organizing Committee

The IPHASA Organizing Committee (OC) is composed of regional co-chairs representing East Africa, Southern Africa and West and Central Africa, as well as paediatric HIV experts. The OC is responsible for selecting topics and developing the symposium programme, reviewing abstracts and chairing meeting sessions.

“The World Health Organization, UNICEF and UNAIDS have for years provided guidelines for countries in implementing HIV services for children living with HIV. However, this has not necessarily translated into policy and practice in diverse regions and countries, especially on the African continent. The aim of IPHASA is to build capacity of healthcare workers, policy makers and all stakeholders in the implementation of evidence-based approaches to reduce the “know-do” gap. At this meeting, best practices and new research findings on children living with and affected by HIV will be disseminated. It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the 1st International Paediatric HIV/AIDS Symposium in Africa. We hope that this virtual symposium, with its unique brand of integrating implementation science research into the programme, will contribute to improving paediatric HIV programmes on the African continent.”

Eleanor Namusoke-Magongo, IPHASA Founder and Chair.

Eleanor Namusoke-Magongo

Co-chair

Uganda, East Africa

Pediatric and Adolescent HIV Care and Treatment Team Lead, Ministry of Health of Uganda, AIDS Control Programme

Marcel Yotebieng

Co-chair

West & Central Africa

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Angela Mushavi

Co-chair

Zimbabwe, Southern Africa

National PMTCT and Paediatric HIV Care and Treatment Coordinator, Ministry of Health and Child Care of Zimbabwe

Philippa Musoke

Local chair

Uganda, East Africa

Professor Pediatrics and Child Health, Department of Pediatrics and Child Health, Makerere College of Health Sciences and Executive Director, Makerere University John Hopkins Collaboration

Adeodata Kekitiinwa

Local chair

Uganda, East Africa

Executive Director, Baylor College of Medicine Children’s Foundation

Martina Penazzato

Switzerland, Europe

Paediatric lead, HIV and Hepatitis Department, WHO

Follow a manual added link

Washington DC, USA

Senior Technical Advisor, Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation

Nande Putta

New York, USA

Paediatric HIV Specialist, UNICEF

Nandita Sugandhi

New York, USA

Senior Programme Officer, ICAP, Columbia University

Di Gibb

United Kingdom, Europe

Professor of Epidemiology and Programme Leader, Paediatric Programme of Trials and Cohorts, MRC Clinical Trials Unit

Peter Elyanu

Uganda, East Africa

Director of Research, Baylor College of Medicine and Children’s Foundation

Birkneh Tilahun Tadesse

Ethiopia, Horn of Africa

Department of Pediatrics and Child Health, Hawassa University Ethiopia

Saeed Ahmed

Malawi, Southern Africa

Founder and Programme Director, USAID-funded Tingathe programme

Nadia Sam-Agudu

Nigeria, West Africa

Senior Technical Advisor, Pediatric and Adolescent HIV, Institute of Human Virology Nigeria, Associate Professor, Institute of Human Virology and Department of Pediatrics, University of Maryland School of Medicine

Kanchana Suggu

New York, USA

Director, Pediatric HIV and eMTCT, Clinton Health Access Inititative

Marissa Vicari

Switzerland, Europe

CIPHER, International AIDS Society

Daphnée Blanc

Switzerland, Europe

CIPHER, International AIDS Society

Angela Mushavi

Dr Angela Mushavi is the National PMTCT and Pediatric HIV Care and Treatment Coordinator in the Ministry of Health and Child Care, providing technical leadership and guidance for the expansion of PMTCT and Pediatric HIV and AIDS care and treatment programs in Zimbabwe. She is involved in policy formulation and guideline development both at national and international levels, and has previously provided technical expertise to the WHO HIV guidelines development process; in 2010 as an external reviewer to the PMTCT guidelines, and in 2013 as a member of the WHO GDG.

Prior to joining the MOHCC in 2010, Dr Angela Mushavi worked with CDC Namibia as a PMTCT Technical Advisor to the Namibian Ministry of Health and Social Services; and managed a large pediatric ART clinic in Windhoek, providing care and treatment to HIV exposed and HIV positive children and adolescents. She is strong advocate for the care of children affected by HIV and sits on the Steering committee of the African Network for the Care of Children Affected by HIV (ANECCA).

Marissa Vicari

Marissa Vicari leads the Collaborative Initiative for Paediatric HIV Education and Research (CIPHER), at International AIDS Society. She has over 15 years’ experience in developing and driving strategic research promotion, cross-sectoral collaborations and advocacy programmes. She is passionate about working with key influencers to identify barriers to – and integrated solutions for – equitable, human rights based and evidence-informed policy and care, focusing on children, youth and women. Marissa holds an MS in Biotechnological Law and Ethics.

Nadia Sam Agudu

Dr. Nadia Sam-Agudu is a clinician-scientist with expertise in pediatric infectious diseases. Her research interests are in the prevention and treatment of major infectious diseases among children and adolescents, including HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. She has further research and advocacy interest in rights-based adolescent sexual and reproductive health, especially as pertains to HIV and other sexually- transmitted infections.

Dr. Sam-Agudu serves in the role of Senior Technical Advisor for Pediatric and Adolescent HIV at the Institute of Human Virology Nigeria, as faculty of the Institute of Human Virology, University of Maryland School of Medicine. In these roles, she has implemented public health programs and research projects across Nigeria, while teaching and mentoring Nigerian and US students and trainees in maternal and child health, health services research and implementation science. Additionally, she has provided technical support to Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Health in policy-making for HIV prevention and treatment for children and adolescents.

Dr. Sam-Agudu is a member and co-chair of the World Health Organization (WHO) Adolescent HIV Service Delivery Technical Working Group and is also a member of the WHO Pediatric Antiretroviral Working Group.

Natella Rakhmanina

Dr. Natella Rakhmanina is a Professor of Pediatrics at the George Washington University and serves as a Director of the HIV Program at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, USA. Dr. Rakhmanina obtained her MD degree at People’s Friendship University in Moscow, Russia, and her PhD degree at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. For more than 20 years she has been providing clinical care to HIV-infected infants, children and adolescents, and continues her practice treating pediatric and adolescent patients in metropolitan DC area. She is certified in HIV medicine and is a successful clinical researcher, focusing her research on the treatment and prevention of HIV in children and adolescents and serving as a principal investigator of NIH, CDC and industry funded pediatric and adolescent HIV studies. Dr. Rakhmanina is also a Senior Technical Advisor at Elizabeth Glaser Pediatrics AIDS Foundation leading several projects on pediatric and adolescent HIV treatment in Sub-Saharan African countries. Dr. Rakhmanina is a Chair of the Committee on Pediatric AIDS at the American Academy of Pediatrics, member of the US Department of Health and Human Services Panel on the Pediatric Antiretroviral Therapy and Management Guidelines at the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council in National Institutes of Health, member of the Pediatric Advisory Working Group at the World Health Organization, and a Regent of the Board and Chair of the Bylaws committee at the American College of Clinical Pharmacology.

Saeed Ahmed

Dr. Saeed Ahmed, MD, MSc, is a board-certified paediatrician with over fifteen years of experience in the comprehensive care and treatment of HIV-infected pregnant women, children, and their families. A member of the inaugural class of the Baylor Paediatric AIDS Corps, Dr. Ahmed has been living and working in Malawi since 2006. He is the founder and programme director of the USAID-funded Tingathe program, which utilizes community health workers to improve uptake and utilization of EID, PMTCT, and HIV care and treatment services in Malawi. Dr. Ahmed also serves as Chief of Party of the USAID-funded Technical Support to PEPFAR Programmes in the Southern Africa Region (TSP) project providing technical assistance and direct service delivery to ten Southern African countries. He holds a medical degree from Yale University School of Medicine and trained in paediatrics at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. Dr. Ahmed is an Associate Professor of Paediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

Adeodata Kekitiinwa

Dr. Addy as she is fondly called is a renowned advocate for children and a passionate leader. Dr. Addy has been central to the establishment of the HIV paediatric unit at Uganda’s Ministry of Health and formulation of policies that have guided the implementation of pediatric HIV prevention, care and treatment.

As an Associate Clinical Professor of Paediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, her major focus over the last 10 years has been to reduce the inequalities of paediatric HIV service delivery by integrating paediatric and adolescent HIV services into main stream adult clinics in rural health facilities through a family-centered model of care.

Before appointment as Executive Director of Baylor-Uganda, she served as Senior Consultant Paediatrician and Clinic Director-Paediatric Infectious Diseases Clinic (2002-2004), while holding the portfolio of Team Leader Paediatric bacterial meningitis surveillance, WHO- Uganda in the same period; Clinical Coordinator Paediatric Laboratories (2000-2004); Head, Diarrhoea Treatment Unit, Mulago Hospital (1995-2004); Consultant Paediatrician (1995-2004); and Instructor and facilitator-Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (1996 -2000). She completed her paediatric residence in 1987 and became Registrar Pediatrician the same year.

Dr. Addy has been very instrumental in ensuring that Baylor Uganda contributes to policy on the elimination and treatment of paediatric and adolescent HIV nationally and internationally. She is the Clinical Research Site Leader for the Division of AIDS Studies at the Baylor- Uganda Centre of Excellence at Mulago Hospital. She has published over 50 papers.

She has spent over three decades as a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor where she has tutored and mentored many of Uganda’s current health professionals.

Martina Penazzato

Dr. Martina Penazzato is the paediatric lead for the HIV, Hepatitis and STIs Department at WHO Headquarter in Geneva. Over the last 15 years, in addition to providing major contribution to several Guidelines development processes in the areas of HIV, TB and child health, she has set up surveillance projects to asses HIVDR in HIV-infected infants, contributed to shape the paediatric HIV research agenda and provided technical assistance to several countries in the African region. In her current role she leads the work of WHO on paediatric treatment and care and contributes to a number of global initiatives to improve access to better medicines for children and investigation of new ARVs for pregnant and lactating women.

Birkneh Tilahun Tadesse

Birkneh Tilahun Tadesse (MD, PhD) is a consultant paediatrician and associate professor at Hawassa University, Ethiopia. Dr. Tadesse has been involved in HIV research in children and adolescents over a decade, supporting regional governments with pediatric HIV service delivery and treatment/care optimization. He is the principal investigator for an EDCTP funded clinical trial (www.pregart.eu) evaluating the optimal antiretroviral treatment regimen to ensure prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV.

Di Gibb

Dr Diana Gibb is a paediatrician and Professor of Epidemiology and Clinical Trials at MRC Clinical Trials Unit at University College London.  Over the last 30 years Di has set up and coordinated a network of clinical trials and cohorts across Europe, Thailand and South America mainly within paediatric HIV infection. This work expanded to Sub-Saharan Africa in the early 2000s where she has undertaken large multi-country trials to address strategy questions in adult and paediatric HIV, more recently expanding to India and South Asia, and into other diseases including tuberculosis, malaria and bacterial infections.

Di was a founder member of Paediatric European Network for Treatment of AIDS (PENTA) and is vice-chair of the PENTA Foundation Board. She has served on Wellcome Trust and MRC research boards as well as WHO advisory and guideline committees. In 2019 she was presented with an honorary doctorate from the University of York and in 2020 was made a fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences.

Eleanor Magongo

Dr. Namusoke-Magongo is the founder of the International Paediatric HIV/AIDS Symposium for Africa (IPHASA). She is a Paediatrician & Child Health Specialist with 14 years’ experience designing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating, and scaling up paediatric and adolescent HIV programmes in sub-Saharan Africa (Uganda). As the Senior Programme Officer (team lead) for Paediatrics and Adolescent HIV Care and Treatment, she is responsible for the overall leadership and coordination, policy development and review, capacity building, quality assurance, resource mobilization and implementation of the national paediatrics and adolescent HIV programme in Uganda. Dr. Namusoke-Magongo is a member of the WHO Adolescent HIV Service Delivery Technical Working Group (ASWG), Child Survival Working Group (CSWG) and more recently the WHO HIVReSNet Steering Group. In 2020, she participated in focus group discussions to develop the next UNAIDS strategy and has also participated in the development of WHO-lead technical briefs for the children and adolescents. She is a member of the NIH-Fogarty funded Adolescent HIV Prevention and Treatment Implementation Science Alliance (AHISA). Dr. Namusoke-Magongo is also the founder of the Paediatric and Adolescent HIV Learning Collaborative for Africa (PAHLCA), a meeting that brings together Ministry of Health, Paediatrics and Adolescent HIV programme managers and country stakeholders to promote south-to-south learning. Dr. Namusoke-Magongo research interests have focused on optimizing antiretroviral therapy for children and adolescents, improving viral suppression and HIV drug resistance. She is leading the establishment of the first national paediatric and adolescent HIV cohort in Uganda.

Marcel Yotebieng

Dr Marcel Yotebieng serves as Associate Professor of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, providing leadership to the Global HIV and Infectious Disease Research Program. He started his professional career as a physician staffing a HIV and a tuberculosis (TB) clinic in a large regional hospital in Limbe, Cameroon. For the past two decades, Marcel has worked across multiple countries in Sub-Saharan Africa as a clinician, public health practitioner, and researcher. From 2009 to 2013, he lived full time in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) supporting the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program and teaching as a visiting faculty at the Kinshasa School of Public Health. His research focus is on the prevention of mother-to-child transmission and HIV care optimization for children living with, or exposed to HIV. He is the PI or mPI of the following ongoing NIH-funded studies: Long term outcomes of therapy in women initiated on lifelong ART because of pregnancy in DR Congo (CQI-PMTCT Study); HIV/ART, low birth weight, and mortality in HIV-exposed uninfected children: a translational mechanistic study; Einstein/Rwanda/DRC Consortium for Research in HIV/HPV/Malignancies; and the Central Africa International Epidemiologic Database to Evaluate AIDS.

Nandita Sugandhi

Nandita Sugandhi is a paediatrician with over 15 years of experience working in Paediatric HIV Care and Treatment.  After completing her training in New York in 2006 she spent four years working with the Baylor International Paediatric AIDS Initiative (BIPAI) to provide clinical care to HIV positive children in Swaziland, Botswana, Tanzania and India.  From 2010-2017 she worked with the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) as a Senior Clinical Advisor to improve access to essential drugs and diagnostics for HIV Prevention and Treatment in resource limited settings.  She is currently an Associate Research Scientist at ICAP at Columbia University and an attending paediatrician at BronxCare Hospital in New York.   Dr Sugandhi also leads the Optimal Paediatric ARV Formulary sub-committee as well as the technical advisory panel for Paediatric AIDS Treatment for Africa (PATA), a network of over 250 clinics in sub-Saharan Africa dedicated to providing high quality paediatric HIV care.

Philippa Musoke

Philippa Musoke, MBChB, PhD is a Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health, School of Medicine, Makerere University, Kampala Uganda and the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Makerere University-Johns Hopkins University Research Collaboration (MUJHU), Kampala. She has been involved in multiple perinatal HIV prevention clinical trials for the last 20 years including the landmark HIVNET012 trial, which informed WHO HIV prevention guidelines leading to implementation of prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT) services globally. In addition, she has conducted various paediatric antiretroviral treatment trials including pharmacokinetic studies which have informed HIV treatment guidelines for infected children. Her areas of interest include PMTCT, Paediatric HIV treatment for resource limited settings and childhood TB diagnostics and treatment.

Nande Putta

Nande is a public health physician who received her medical degree from the University of Zambia; her Public Health & Epidemiology Master’s degree as a Fogarty Fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), USA; and her Business Analytics Master of Science degree from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University (NYU STERN), USA. She works with United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) based in New York at the headquarters office as Programme Specialist Child Survival, working across Health and HIV sectors, to strengthen systems, integration and innovation for child survival and for chronic care. Her prior professional roles have included leadership positions in her home country Zambia, both in the Ministry of Health and in the Non-Governmental Sector. She has also worked across multiple countries and regions of UNICEFs programmes providing strategic advisory and technical support for prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT), Pediatric-Adolescent HIV and Maternal, Newborn and Child Health programmes; and has published multiple peer reviewed articles.

Kanchana Suggu

Kanchana Suggu is the Director of Paediatric HIV and eMTCT at the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI). In this role, she leads development of CHAI’s comprehensive paediatric HIV strategy and oversees implementation in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa. She has over 12 years of experience in strategy, design, and delivery of HIV/AIDS, maternal, and child health programmes. Prior to stepping into this role, Kanchana was the Deputy Country Director in CHAI’s Liberia office, where she supported the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare to develop a national Accelerated Action Plan to Reduce Maternal and Neonatal Mortality and helped establish health financing and family planning programmes for CHAI in Liberia. Earlier in her career, Kanchana worked in the private sector for global research firms specialized in delivering custom expertise to leading hedge funds, private equity firms, investment banks, venture capital and consulting firms. She has a MA in International Affairs from the George Washington University, where she was a High Honors Fellow; and has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Mumbai.

Daphnée Blanc

Daphnée Blanc is a Project Manager for the Collaborative Initiative for Paediatric HIV Education and Research (CIPHER), at the International AIDS Society. In this role, she leads several projects focusing on addressing priority knowledge gaps in paediatric and adolescent HIV and accelerating the translation of research evidence into policies and programmes. Earlier in her career, Daphnée worked with the University of Oxford on a research project in South Africa to evaluate an evidence-based child abuse prevention programme for vulnerable families with adolescents. She also worked for Save the Children where she was responsible for a programme focusing on advocacy and campaigning work on child protection and child rights governance as well as for WHO in Cambodia. Daphnée holds a Master Degree in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science.