Anthony S. Fauci, MD, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), delivered the keynote address to open the 12th annual George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS) Clinical Public Health (CPH) Summit on HIV, Dec. 17, 2025. The three-day summit brought together GW SMHS first-year medical students, public health leaders, and senior HIV/AIDS officials from across the country to examine the evolving challenges of the HIV epidemic and the role physicians can play beyond the clinic.
The HIV summit is part of a broader clinical public health curriculum at GW SMHS designed to prepare future physicians for a rapidly changing health care landscape. “This unique opportunity offers members of the Class of 2029,” organizers said, a chance to learn directly from senior HIV/AIDS officials and experts working at the federal, state, city, and community levels to develop innovative proposals to address the epidemic.
A Clinical Public Health Classroom
Welcoming students, members of the National Association of State and Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD), and Fauci, Anne Monroe, MD, MPH, associate professor of epidemiology, at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at GW, emphasized the importance of grounding medical training in population health.
“The summit will provide you with experience in the clinical public health roles that await you as a physician who practice modern, socially conscious medicine,” she said, describing physicians as community health leaders who translate science, epidemiology, and health systems knowledge into population-level action.
The HIV summit is the first of four clinical public health events held annually for SMHS medical students, with others focused on asthma, obesity, with a self-directed summit for fourth-year students. Beginning in the 2014–15 academic year, SMHS formally integrated clinical public health education into its MD curriculum. Since then, the summits have served as its cornerstone, offering students a structured way to examine how economic, social, and structural forces shape health outcomes — and how clinicians can intervene to reduce disparities.
Defining the Physician’s Role
Barbara Lee Bass, MD, RESD ’86, vice president for health affairs and dean of GW SMHS, Walter A. Bloedorn Chair of Administrative Medicine, and professor of surgery, described clinical public health as a defining feature of the school. GW’s program, she said, “is one of our signature programs.”
Addressing first-year students, Bass called the summit “a unique opportunity … to develop innovative proposals to address the HIV epidemic at the city and state levels.”
Bass also stressed that the summit was intended to broaden students’ understanding of their professional responsibilities. The experience, she said, “will give you a sense of your essential role as a physician outside of the clinic … in living in the communities that we serve.”
Jillian Catalanotti, MD, MPH, associate dean for clinical public health and population health practice, underscored the summit’s applied focus. “This is our opportunity to meet people who are actually doing this work,” she said, noting that many participating officials volunteer their time because students’ ideas have led to real-world change.
“[The reason people want to come back is because we have a history of our students' ideas actually being good enough that they have brought them back to their states and actually be implemented.]”
A Career Shaped by Crisis
As he has since the summit’s inception, Fauci, now 85 and retired from public service, offered students a glimpse of the surprising arc a career in science and medicine can take, and encouraged them to embrace those unanticipated opportunities. A plan for a post-residency clinical practice, once so vivid he knew the exact street in Manhattan he would locate his future office, became instead a research fellowship at the NIH, and then a lab to call his own developing therapies for vasculitis syndromes, and then a shift to serve scientific administration leader.
In those early days of his career, Fauci recalled, the future of infectious disease as a specialty seemed uncertain. In a 1978 New England Journal of Medicine article, “A Doctor’s Dilemma,” Robert G. Petersdorf, MD, questioned the growing number of infectious disease fellows, writing, “Even with my great personal loyalties to infectious disease, I cannot conceive a need for 309 more infectious-disease experts unless they spend their time culturing each other.”
The public health landscape soon changed. In early 1981, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report described five gay men in Los Angeles with pneumocystis pneumonia. A month later, a follow-up report cited 26 gay men across the country with the same rare cancer. Fauci recognized the emergence of a deadly new pathogen and abandoned his work on Wegener’s granulomatosis to focus on what would become known as HIV/AIDS.
“I actually got goosebumps thinking this had to [be] a rare new disease,” Fauci recalled.
In 1984, Fauci upended his career trajectory to become the director of NIAID, positioning him to integrate clinical care, laboratory science, and public health at a national scale. “I didn't like the idea of science management or administration,” he said, but decided if he really wanted to contribute to the work around HIV/AIDS, he had to do something he was not trained to do as a physician, learn the relationship between politics, policy, and medicine.
Over more than four decades at NIAID, learned how to navigate Washington, D.C., and work with the Congress and the White House working with seven U.S. presidents and “appearing before Congress more than anyone in the history of the United States.”
Each administration brought something to the pandemic. Under George H.W. Bush and a bipartisan Congress, he recalled, funding for HIV/AIDS research expanded significantly. The Clinton administration established the AIDS Vaccine Research Center at NIH, which later played a key role in the development of COVID-19 vaccines.
Fauci described the creation of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) under President George W. Bush as one of the most consequential global public health interventions. Bush, Fauci recalled, said, “We as a rich nation have a moral obligation to help those who do not have access to HIV treatment and care because they lack the resources.”
“Fast forward 20 plus years,” Fauci said, PEPFAR now operates in 50 countries, has invested more than $110 billion, and has achieved results he called “among the most important public health endeavors in history,” including 26 million lives saved.
He also highlighted the dramatic shift in clinical outcomes since the early years of the epidemic. Early on, the probability of death within five years of diagnosis reached 85%. With the advent of combination therapy, that outlook has changed. “If you look at median survival of a 20 plus year old today it’s about 50 years,” he said, “meaning that … you can actually give that person the promise of an almost normal life.”
Fauci closed by reinforcing a central theme of the summit: medicine, public health, and policy are inseparable — and physicians can shape population-level outcomes far beyond the exam room.
Safeguarding Progress
The final day of the summit opened with a recorded message from Rep. Mark Pocan (D–WI), chair of the Bipartisan Congressional HIV Caucus. Pocan discussed the progress made against HIV. Prevention tools and global programs such as PEPFAR have reduced new infections, improved lives, and strengthened health systems around the world. That progress, however, is fragile. Shifts in the Trump administrative agenda, he suggested, threaten the long-standing funding for domestic HIV prevention and treatment, including testing, contact tracing, and PReP access.
“For more than 20 years,” Rep. Pocan argued, “the U.S. has been the backbone of the international HIV response. But the dismantling of USAID and the elimination of global health funding will lead to millions of additional infections and has already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.”
The consequences of those decisions, he said, will be felt first and worst by people who already face barriers to care, low-income communities, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and those in rural areas. Bridging that, he added, where the next generation of physicians come in.
“As future physicians, researchers, public health leaders, and advocates, you have a crucial role to play,” he urged. “You will have a powerful voice telling your members of Congress that cutting HIV, prevention, or pulling back on global programs is unacceptable. We need you to help hold Congress and the administration accountable. Medicine and policy are not separate worlds. Your clinical work informs better public policy, and better public policy makes your clinical work possible.”
Preparing Future Physician Advocates
Following Rep. Pocan’s charge to the students, LaQuandra Nesbitt, MD, MPH, senior associate dean for population health and health equity, and Bicentennial Endowed Professor of Medicine and Health Sciences, discussed the emerging role of clinicians in public health responses. Emphasizing the interdependence between medicine and public health, clinicians, she said, have a responsibility to think broadly about the social and economic impacts of clinical investigations, policy measures, behavior surveys, and informing decisions about healthcare system capacity.
“Medicine and policy are not separate worlds,” she said. “Your clinical work informs better public policy, and better public policy makes your clinical work possible.
“As clinicians and physicians,” Nesbitt continued, “you will be one of the most trusted people, regardless of whether or not you have a leadership role in society. Your patients will trust you, and they will want to follow your lead. You will have to do some things very publicly during a public health response to be able to get people to trust that the things that you tell them to do [will keep them safe].”
Throughout the three-day event, senior HIV/AIDS officials representing the District of Columbia, Indiana, Maryland, New York City, North Carolina, Philadelphia, and Virginia were on hand to share data and describe challenges unique to their jurisdictions. Students worked in teams with these leaders to design strategic plans tailored to local epidemiology, health system capacity, and community factors. On the final day, each team presented its plan to a panel of federal and state experts, who provided feedback on feasibility, sustainability, and impact.
