Donaldson Conserve MS, PhD

Donaldson F. Conserve, MS, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health in the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University. His research focuses on implementing and disseminating evidence-based HIV prevention, care, and treatment interventions for scale-up and population impact. As part of his K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institutes of Mental Health, he developed the Self-Testing Education and Promotion (STEP) Project and contributed to the implementation of science efforts to promote community-based HIV self-testing (HIVST) distribution in Tanzania. Building on his experience in Tanzania, he has expanded his research on HIVST to his native country of Haiti, and other Sub-Saharan African countries with collaborators from the HIV Self-Testing Africa (STAR) Initiative, the world’s largest HIVST implementation science project to date. In the US, he is contributing to the upcoming HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) 096 protocol, a community-randomized implementation science trial designed to test an integrated, HIV status-neutral, population-level health equity approach to reducing intersectional stigma and increasing rates of HIV testing, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) uptake, and HIV viral suppression among Black men who have sex with men (MSM). Currently, he is leveraging his HIVST research experience to inform the implementation of COVID-19 self-testing, which was recently authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.