Rebeca M. Plank MD, MPH

Dr. Rebeca Plank is an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and is also a Research Associate at the Harvard School of Public Health. After graduating from medical school at the University of California, San Francisco has already worked in Brazil and done research in rural Vietnam, Dr. Plank headed to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to complete her training, first as a resident, then as a chief medical resident, and finally as a clinical and research fellow in infectious diseases, with a special focus on HIV.

Dr. Plank’s hard work and tenacity led her to become Principal Investigator of the clinical trial, Infant Male Circumcision in Gaborone, Botswana, and Surrounding Areas: Feasibility, Safety, and Acceptability. The work done by Dr. Plank and her team have taken Botswana from a theoretical acceptability study of infant circumcision in 2008 to the national roll-out of the procedure in the public sector in 2014. These days, Plank splits her time between conducting HIV prevention research in Botswana and Kenya and seeing patients in Boston. She was awarded an NIH Career Development Award to support her work in Botswana and she now has an R01 grant supporting her HIV-prevention work in Kenya.