Georgetown Center for Global Health Policy & Politics welcomes leading diagnostics expert Dr. Lara Vojnov as Senior Scholar

The Georgetown Center for Global Health Policy & Politics is pleased to announce that Dr. Lara Vojnov has joined as a Senior Scholar.

“We are honored to welcome Dr. Vojnov, one of the world’s leading authorities on diagnostics
for HIV and other infectious diseases,” said Dr. Matthew M. Kavanagh, director of the Center for
Global Health Policy & Politics and chair of the Global Health department. “Her work has done
more than almost anyone’s to close the gap between the tests science can offer and the people
who actually need them. This is exactly the kind of evidence that turns commitments into
results.”

Dr. Vojnov is a global public health scientist whose research has shaped how HIV is diagnosed
and monitored across low- and middle-income settings. Over more than a decade at the World
Health Organization and the Clinton Health Access Initiative — with early fieldwork in Liberia,
Tanzania, and Mozambique — she led the evidence base for point-of-care testing, early infant
diagnosis, and decentralised viral-load monitoring, generating research that underpinned
successive WHO guidelines. She currently serves on WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of
Experts on In Vitro Diagnostics (SAGE-IVD) and Global Validation Advisory Committee (GVAC)
and co-chairs the Lancet Commission on societal resilience in a new pandemic age.

Her published work spans landmark systematic reviews, including the finding that HIV is not
sexually transmitted at low-level viraemia, which reshaped how suppression is defined in policy
and practice. She has also led influential studies on infant diagnosis, CD4 testing, and the
persistent inequities in who is reached by diagnostic services. During the COVID-19 pandemic,
she led the global Diagnostics Consortium for COVID-19, whose aim was to support country
access to diagnostics under severe and inequitable shortages. That focus on equity in testing,
from HIV to advanced HIV disease in children, sits squarely at the heart of the Center’s work.

“The science of HIV diagnostics has outpaced the policy and financing systems meant to deliver
them. Too many people, especially children and those with advanced disease, still fall through
gaps we know how to close. My focus will be on policy that gets HIV diagnostics to the people
who need them most, to cut transmission and prevent deaths that are entirely preventable,” said
Dr Vojnov.

At the Center, Dr. Vojnov’s work will focus on understanding the value and benefits of a variety
of diagnostic tools as global and clinical settings change, strengthening the Center’s
engagement on diagnostics access, health security, and the politics of who gets tested and
treated.

“Lara has spent her career making sure the tools we have actually reach the people they were
built for,” said Sharonann Lynch, Co-Director of GHPP. “That instinct is exactly what we need as
diagnostics move to the center of the fight against TB, HIV, and the next pandemic.”