Brazil - UFBA

​The Infectious Diseases program at University of California, San Diego
maintains strong ties with the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Salvador (UFBA), Brazil. Dr. Roberto Badaro, chairman of the Department of Medicine, and an adjunct faculty member of UCSD coordinates collaborative projects in HIV and tropical parasitic diseases.

Drs. Robert Schooley, Sanjay Mehta, and Robert Huang have been working closely with Dr. Badaro and UFBA since 2004.  

A second area of collaboration between UCSD, UFBA involves a third member, Precision Photonics, a Boulder, CO based company. The three institutions are currently working on a simple, inexpensive point of care infectious disease diagnostics system for rural and "bush" medicine. Recently, new investigations have started with Zika infection in Brazil with Drs. Robert Badaro, Robert Schooley, Davey Smith, and Kevan Akrami. In fact, Dr. Akrami was awarded a Fulbright fellowship for this work in 2017. 

NeuroAIDS in Brazil:

Members of the Human Neurobehavioral Research Center (HNRC) are collaborating with Hospital de Clinicas da UFPR (Universidade Federal da Parana) and have established a cohort of individuals with HIV that are enrolled in several studies looking at the effects of HIV on the central nervous system. This study part of a larger international collaboration that aims to study the differences in neuropathology between different clades of HIV. These investigations include Drs. Ajay Bharti, Scott Letendre, and Davey Smith from UCSD and Dr. de Almeida from UFPR.