Gupta Named Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases

Dr. Amita Gupta will be our next director of the Division of Infectious Diseases effective immediately.

Dr. Gupta is a Professor of Medicine with a joint appointment in International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is deputy director of the JHU Center for Clinical Global Health Education and a faculty co-chair for the Johns Hopkins India Institute. Dr. Gupta specializes in international public health, clinical research and education in infectious diseases, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and antimicrobial resistant infections. Since 2003, her work has focused primarily on India, where she leads several Indo-JHU research collaborations funded by NIH, CDC, UNITAID and others. She serves in leadership positions in RePORT India and RePORT International, a multilateral global consortia for TB research, and is co-principal investigator of the NIH-funded JHU Baltimore-India HIV and Infectious Diseases Clinical Trials Unit which seeks to identify new treatments and vaccines for HIV, TB and other infections globally through the AIDS Clinical Trials Group and the International Maternal Pediatric Adolescent AIDS Clinical Trials Network. Most recently, she has been a member of the Hopkins COVID Precision Medicine Center of Excellence. In 2019, Dr. Gupta was appointed by the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary for a four-year term to the NIAID Council, the chief advisory committee for National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH. Dr. Gupta is an author of more than 220 peer-reviewed research publications and has mentored more than 35 junior scientists in the U.S. and India.

Dr. Gupta earned her medical degree from Harvard, and completed her internal medicine residency at the University of California San Francisco and a fellowship with the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2003, she came to Hopkins to work with Dr. Bob Bollinger in India and to complete an infectious disease fellowship and went on to earn her Master’s in Health Sciences in clinical investigation from the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her wife is Dr. Charlotte Sumner, Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience, and they reside with their son in Fells Point.

We would like to extend a huge thank you to Dr. David Thomas who not only expertly led the Division of Infectious Diseases for over 15 years, but has remained committed to the division during this time of transition. We would also like to our search committee led by Drs. Nadia Hansel and Chirag Parikh who ably completed the difficult task of narrowing the pool of qualified candidates. We are thankful for their help in selecting Dr. Amita Gupta as our next director of the Division of Infectious Diseases, and confident in her ability to lead the division into the future.