University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, NC USA
Dr. Myron Cohen’s research focuses on the transmission and prevention of transmission of HIV. Dr. Cohen helped to develop laboratory methods to measure HIV in genital secretions, as well as methods to detect the best antiviral agents to reduce replication of HIV in these compartments. For this work, Dr. Cohen has received 30 years of continuous funding from the NIH, including an NIH MERIT Award. Dr. Cohen is the architect and principal investigator of the multinational HPTN 052 trial, which demonstrated that antiretroviral treatment prevents the sexual transmission of HIV-1. This work was recognized by Science Magazine as the “Breakthrough of the Year” in 2011.
Dr. Cohen has written extensively about the prevention of HIV infection and is the author or more than 500 publications. Much of Dr. Cohen’s research has been conducted in resource-constrained countries, especially Malawi and China.Dr. Cohen received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Rush Medical College in 2000. He received the Thomas Parran Award (2005) for lifetime achievement in STD research from the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association. In 2008 Dr. Cohen received the O. Max Gardner Award, the highest honor in the University of North Carolina 16-campus system.
Dr. Cohen received a B.S. degree from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana and an M.D. degree from Rush Medical College. He completed training in internal medicine at the University of Michigan and an infectious disease fellowship at Yale. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Disease Society of America and a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the American Association of Physicians. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2012.