Biography

Dr. David Katzenstein works on strategies for ART and low-cost diagnostics in resource limited settings. He has a joint appointment at the Biomedical Research and Training Institute in Zimbabwe to support scientific and medical education and strengthen HIV/AIDS care and treatment.  He is a Professor of Medicine in Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Dr. Katzenstein has over 25 years of international experience in HIV/AIDS.  His current research in Africa and Asia is focused on operational studies of antiretroviral therapy, drug resistance in different subtypes and the molecular evolution of HIV. He is the Principal Investigator (“PI”) of a Fogarty training grant the International Clinical Operational Health Services Award (ICOHRTA) with Professor Peter Mason conducting training for post-graduate students in studies of HIV infection and treatment in Zimbabwe and South Africa. He is also a founder of a broad network of virologists and clinicians, the Southern African Treatment Research Network (SATURN).  In Asia Dr. Katzenstein is a principle in the Treat Asia Quality Assurance Scheme (TAQAS) to build drug resistance surveillance capacity in multiple laboratories in Asia. He is the PI of an NIH grant with three laboratories in Asia to explore differences among diverse HIV subtypes and to implement and validate new diagnostic testing for drug resistance.

Dr. Katzenstein completed his undergraduate and medical degrees and residency in Internal Medicine and Fellowship training in Infectious Diseases at the University of California San Diego. He began a fellowship in Infectious Disease in the Bay area in 1980, just as HIV and AIDS were recognized as a new disease. His research, at UC Davis, was focused on the role of CMV in immunodeficiency and early studies of molecular diagnostics in detection of viruses. Moving to the University of Minnesota in 1984, Dr. Katzenstein founded the HIV diagnostic laboratory there as an early AIDS Clinical Trials Unit. In 1985 he went to Zimbabwe as visiting lecturer in the Departments of Medical Microbiology and Medicine at the University of Zimbabwe, just as the AIDS epidemic was first recognized in Southern Africa.

In 1987, he served as a senior research fellowship at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the Food and Drug Administration in the Vaccine Branch, evaluating early candidate HIV Vaccines and diagnostics. Dr. Katzenstein returned to California in 1989 to work with Dr. Thomas Merigan and the AIDS Clinical Trials Group. He continued an active collaboration with colleagues in Zimbabwe and founded the Zimbabwe AIDS Prevention Project (ZAPP) a university-community collaboration in Zimbabwe with ties to neighboring Southern African countries in prevention, peri-natal transmission, drug and vaccine research.  At Stanford, Dr. Katzenstein led the largest US trial of multidrug therapy (ACTG 175) in the early nineties and as the principal investigator for Stanford’s Virology Service Laboratory in the center for AIDS Research his laboratory. Recently Dr. Katzenstein served as the virologist for the ACTG 5202 study, an 1800 patient study of contemporary HAART regimens. In addition his lab supports studies of multiple drugs and drug combinations and immunotherapeutics.