SUNITI SOLOMON, Director, YRGCARE

Dr. Suniti Solomon is the founder-director of the Y.R. Gaitonde Center for AIDS Research and Education (YRGCARE), a premier HIV/AIDS care and support centre in Chennai. She and her colleagues documented the first evidence of the HIV infection in India in 1986. When she served the Madras Medical College and Government General Hospital as a Professor of Microbiology, she set up the first voluntary testing and counseling centre and an AIDS Research Group in Chennai. In 2006, YRGCARE in collaboration with Indian Red Cross Society opened its first satellite clinic in Nellore, inaugurated by Smt. Panabaka Lakshmi, Hon. State Minister for Health & Family Welfare, Govt. of India.

Dr. Solomon is a member of the National Technical Team on women and AIDS, a member of the advisory board of International AIDS Vaccine Initiative-India, member of the Scientific Committee of the National AIDS Research Institute, Pune, Government of India, a permanent member on the Microbicides Committee of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), and is a member on the board of AVAHAN, the India HIV/AIDS Initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Trustee At-Large of the International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care; and member of the Asia Data Safety Monitoring Board of the Division of AIDS, NIH, USA.

Dr. Solomon is the Indian Principal Investigator of several pioneering HIV research studies: the US National Institute of Mental Health's multi-country HIV/STD Prevention Trial; the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' HIV Prevention Trial Networks; NIH award that will measure stigma in health care settings in Southern India; and a NIH study to focus on immune correlates of mucosal transmission of HIV-1 to women in Chennai, India.

She is the Director of the Southern India program of the Brown-Tufts Fogarty AIDS Training and Research Project.  Dr Solomon’s experience covers a wide range of aspects related to HIV infection, from biomedical to socio-economic. She has deep interest in community education and mobilization and leads an effort that supports a Phase I HIV vaccine trial at Chennai with community education and volunteer enrollment. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award for her work with AIDS from the State Government's Medical University in December 2001 and a second Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005 from the Tamil Nadu State AIDS Control Society.  She was also awarded honorary doctoral degree in 2006 from Brown University, RI, USA  and National Women Bioscientists Award for the year 2009 and Sivananda Eminent Citizen award in 2009 from the Sanathana Dharma Charitable Trust, Secunderabad. N’Galy-Mann Award at the 17th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2010) in San Francisco Tamilnadu Scientist Award and Mother Teresa Memorial Award in 2010 for Education and Humanitarian Services and  Fellow of the Academy, from National Academy of Medical Science, New Delhi in 2010.

Dr Solomon has published extensively on HIV epidemiology, prevention, care and support, biomedical research, research ethics and gender issues.

She holds an M.D in microbiology from Madras University. She has trained in pathology in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Dr. Solomon served as a member of the State Planning Commission between 2006- 2010.