AMPATH Investigators Selected as Prestigious Fogarty Fellows
AMPATH investigators Dr. Florence Jaguga and Jepchirchir (Chiri) Kiplagat, PhD, received prestigious Fogarty Global Health Fellowships through the Northern/Pacific Global Health (NPGH) Research Training Consortium.
Dr. Jaguga’s research focuses on the feasibility and acceptability of a peer-delivered substance use screening and brief intervention for youth living with HIV in Kenya. Dr. Kiplagat plans to study the feasibility of integrating hypertension and diabetes screening and management with HIV care services for older adults.
Dr. Florence Jaguga and Dr. Jepchirchir (Chiri) Kiplagat are 2021 Fogarty Fellows.
The Global Health Fellowship Program is a 12-month clinical research training sponsored by the National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center (FIC) in partnership with several NIH Institutes and Offices. Fellows represent academic institutions from the US as well as partners in low and middle-income countries. In addition to being selected in the same Fogarty Fellows cohort, Drs. Jaguga and Kiplagat were also roommates for four years during their undergraduate studies at Moi University Faculty of Health Sciences (now college of Health Science).
Dr. Jaguga is a consultant psychiatrist in the alcohol and drug abuse rehabilitation unit, department of mental health at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH). “My career goal is to increase access to substance use disorder treatment and prevention in Kenya and other resource-limited settings,” she said. “In such settings, substance use disorders are prevalent, yet up to 90 percent of affected persons lack access to treatment. Youth living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa are at high risk of substance use yet lack access to substance use interventions,” she said.
Five peer mentors will be trained to administer a screening and brief intervention to 100 youth aged 15-24 years. The study will evaluate both the feasibility of the peer-delivered screening and brief intervention and the acceptability from the perspective of the youth.
Dr. Kiplagat’s research is an extension of her PhD project that assessed the impact of age on retention in care and explored the experiences of older adults in seeking HIV care services. “My work on HIV and aging was the first at AMPATH and has opened a dialogue about how to tailor HIV services to older adults,” she said. Due to HIV infection, persons aged 50 years and above have an increased risk of developing noncommunicable diseases when compared to their HIV uninfected counterparts. Her Fogarty project will determine unmet needs for hypertension and diabetes screening and treatment in older adults living with HIV and assess feasibility and acceptability of utilizing AMPATH’s HIV care platform to provide diabetes and hypertension screening and treatment services.
“I believe that global health is not just about working in resource-constrained settings but building a team of multi-disciplinary, multi-country researchers to address issues of key importance – experience that I have gained over the years of working at AMPATH,” added Dr. Kiplagat who is the AMPATH research administrative manager in Kenya.
The Fogarty International Center is dedicated to advancing the mission of the NIH by supporting and facilitating global health research conducted by U.S. and international investigators, building partnerships between health research institutions in the U.S. and abroad, and training the next generation of scientists to address global health needs.
Physician-scientists from Indiana University and Moi University provide mentorship for the fellows. Mary Ott, MD, MA, mentors Dr. Jaguga and said, “I am particularly excited about the focus and quality of the proposal from Dr. Jaguga. Substance use disorder is not only a serious public health issue in and of itself, it is a key driver for Kenya’s HIV epidemic (and will likely drive the COVID pandemic). This is the point where my adolescent health work intersects with Dr. Jaguga’s psychiatry work.”
Dr. Jaguga’s Kenyan mentor Dr. Edith Kwobah, head of the department of mental health at MTRH, lauded her qualifications. “She is self-driven and highly-committed to her work and has seen major improvements in our alcohol and drug abuse unit.”
Kara Wools-Kaloustian, MD, MPH, director of research for the IU Center for Global Health, serves as a mentor to Dr. Kiplagat. Wools-Kaloustian has conducted research within the AMPATH partnership for nearly three decades and leads the East Africa portion of the International Epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA). “Recent efforts in IeDEA are directed towards assessing the epidemiology of and identifying interventions for non-communicable diseases that are contributing poor outcomes in people living with HIV. Dr. Kiplagat’s project is, therefore, very relevant and timely,” she said.
Dr. Kiplagat’s in-country mentor, Dr. Jemima Kamano, director of the chronic disease management program at AMPATH added, “This information would be very useful in designing more efficient health systems for chronic disease that utilize available resources and systems most efficiently. I have observed Dr. Kiplagat show exemplary performance in executing her roles and responsibilities and she has great potential of becoming a great scholar.”
The NPGH Research Fellows Training Consortium is a partnership between IU and the Universities of Washington, Hawaii, Michigan and Minnesota; with international partnerships in Kenya, Cameroon, Uganda, Ghana, Liberia, Peru, Thailand, Nepal and India. These institutions have a strong collaborative history and existing NIH training grant programs.
Applications for the 2022-23 Fogarty Fellowship are expected to open in August.