Deborah Persaud, MD

Dr. Deborah Persaud is a professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins Children's Center. She holds joint appointments in international health and molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.A clinician and researcher specializing in the study and treatment of HIV-1 infection in children, she directs the pediatric infectious diseases fellowship program at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.Dr. Persaud received her B.S. in chemistry from York College in New York. A 1985 graduate of the New York University School of Medicine, she trained in pediatrics at Babies Hospital/Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, where she was chief resident. She was an infectious disease fellow, an Aaron Diamond postdoctoral research fellow and a faculty member at New York University. She joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1997, …following a visiting lectureship at the Moi University in Eldoret, Kenya.Her research interests include HIV/AIDS drug development and mother-to-child HIV transmission.Dr. Persaud is the scientific chair of the HIV CURE Scientific Committee of the International Maternal, Pediatric Adolescent AIDS Clinical Trials (IMPAACT) group. She was awarded the prestigious Elizabeth Glaser Scientist Award for her HIV research and was recognized by Nature magazine in 2013 as one of “Ten People Who Mattered This Year.” She was recognized by Time magazine as among the “100 Most Influential People of 2013” for her pediatric HIV treatment research.