Andrea Cox, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases, became the director of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Medical Scientist Training/M.D.-Ph.D. Program, effective August 1, 2015.
Dr. Cox, who has co-directed the program since 2013, will assume leadership of the M.D.-Ph.D. program from Robert Siliciano, who has directed the program since 1999. Under Dr. Siliciano’s leadership, the M.D.-Ph.D. program has been one of the most highly regarded physician-scientist training programs in the world, with unprecedented perfect scores on its two most recent NIH training grant renewals. Dr. Siliciano will continue to work closely with Dr. Cox as senior scientific advisor in the program, with a focus on advising students in research-related aspects of training.
Dr. Cox earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Virginia, where she worked on the characterization of peptide T cell antigens. She then earned her M.D. and completed internal medicine residency and infectious disease fellowship training at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Cox is an internationally recognized leader in studies of the host immune response to chronic viral infections, including HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C (HCV). She leads the largest prospective cohort study of acute HCV infection designed to enable detailed molecular analysis of HCV transmission, host immune responses and virus sequence evolution. Dr. Cox is the principal investigator on the first prophylactic HCV vaccine trial in individuals at risk of HCV infection. In addition to her research on chronic viral infections, Dr. Cox is actively involved in clinical care of patients with HCV, HIV and hepatitis B infection. She thus brings to the program expertise in both basic research and clinical medicine.
Dr. Cox is also an outstanding teacher, advisor and mentor of physician-scientists. She is a faculty member in the Cellular and Molecular Medicine and the Immunology graduate programs at the school of medicine, and in the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology. Dr. Cox also serves as the faculty advisor for the Association of Women Student M.D.-Ph.D.s.
Johns Hopkins is grateful to Dr. Siliciano for helping make the M.D.-Ph.D. program a recognized leader in the training of physician-scientists, and we are confident that the program will continue to train and educate future leaders in fundamental and biomedical research and clinical medicine under Dr. Cox’s leadership.
