Myron S. Cohen MD

Myron S. Cohen, M.D. is the Yeargan-Bate Eminent Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology and Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Disease Society of America, and a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the American Association of Physicians. He serves as the Director of the UNC Division of Infectious Disease and the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Disease, and as Associate Vice Chancellor for Global Health. Dr. Cohen serves as the co-principal investigator of the NIH HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN).

Dr. Cohen received his B.S. degree magna cum laude from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. After earning an M.D. degree from Rush Medical College in Chicago, he completed training in internal medicine at the University of Michigan and in infectious diseases at Yale University.

Dr. Cohen's honors include the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Rush Medical College (2000); the Distinguished Career Award for lifetime achievement in STD/HIV research from the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association (2005); the O. Max Gardner Award, the highest honor in the University of North Carolina System (2008); and the Smadel Award from the Infectious Disease Society in recognition of his work in public health (2013).

Dr. 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 determine the best antiviral agents to reduce replication of HIV in these compartments. Dr. Cohen is the architect and Principal Investigator of the multinational HPTN 052 trial, which demonstrated that antiretroviral treatment of people with HIV infection prevents the sexual transmission of the virus. This work was recognized byScience magazine as the "Breakthrough of the Year" in 2011.

Dr. Cohen is the author of more than 500 publications and a book. He has written extensively about the prevention of HIV infection. Much of Dr. Cohen's research has been conducted over the past three decades in resource-constrained countries, especially in Malawi and in the People's Republic of China.