“I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do,’ ” Mofenson said.
She received her medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York in 1977 as a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases.
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She worked at Boston Children’s Hospital and directed the communicable disease program as assistant commissioner for public health in Massachusetts before joining the staff at the NIH.
R.J. Simonds, vice president of program innovation and policy at the District-based Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, said Mofenson’s passion for treating HIV-infected children and her scientific and policy skills make her “effective and influential.”
“Everyone in the field she works with gets her slides. She’s more open than anyone I know with sharing her hard work,” Simonds said.
Pushing for collaboration
Mofenson said that before HIV and AIDS, research used to be a secret preserve. Scientists and researchers wouldn’t share findings until they were published. When she came to the NIH, Mofenson said she found that institutions were not working together to match patients with clinical drug trials and to combine research efforts. She said that although she’s flattered about being nominated for the Career Achievement Medal, she also recognizes “the work of a remarkable group of smart, dedicated people who have worked together to make this research happen.”
“The biggest challenge has been bringing people together to collaborate and getting consensus and finding a way that everybody wins, so that rather than competing, we’re all gaining something and that people realize by working together you can make a larger difference than working separately,” she said.
Her focus now is on the UNICEF and WHO 2015 elimination plan, which aims to reduce the number of children newly infected with HIV by 90 percent, and to achieve a 50 percent reduction in the number of AIDS-related maternal deaths, in three years.
Once she’s finished with her work at the NIH in the near future, she hopes to spend more time with her husband, Bruce, and her daughter, Jessica, 30. She also wants to spend more time in her garden and work on her photography.
Until then, she’s hoping to train her successors. She doesn’t want the research she has helped foster to wither away after she leaves.
“If you’re the only person that does things, then when you leave, everything falls apart,” Mofenson said.
“It’s important to not just do things but teach people how to do them so when you’re long gone, there’s a legacy and the work is still ongoing. A large part of working in the federal government is to be able to get new leaders to follow you after you leave.”
Asked whether there’s a new medical mystery she’d like to take on, the veteran of the HIV wars demurred: “But this one isn’t solved yet.”
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