2023 Fialkow Award
Congratulations to Dr. Rachel Bender Ignacio, assistant professor (Allergy and Infectious Diseases), who is the 2023 recipient of the Fialkow Award.
The Fialkow Award honors the late UW Dean of Medicine and Chair of Medicine Dr. Philip Fialkow and his wife, the late Helen Fialkow, and recognizes the outstanding achievements of junior faculty in medicine in research, teaching, clinical work, and academic citizenship.
Dr. Bender Ignacio will formally receive the award and present at Medicine Grand Rounds in the fall.
Dr. Bender Ignacio is a physician scientist focused on HIV clinical trials, clinical epidemiology, and translational research.
As director of UW Positive Research, she oversees more than 15 ongoing interventional studies for people with HIV, including studies focused on novel HIV therapeutics, HIV remission studies, and studies on metabolic effects of HIV and HIV-associated co-infections through the AIDS Clinical Trials Group.
UW Positive research also conducts other NIH and sponsored research, including newer partnerships with NIDA and the Cancer Immunotherapy Trials Network, to conduct studies on substance use disorders and HIV-associated cancers, respectively.
UW Positive Research is participating in the NIH's ACTIV-2 study on COVID-19 therapeutics and in the STOMP Study of Tecovirimat for human Monkey Pox study. The research site also hosts the CHARTER study on neurocognition in HIV as well as other observational clinical studies.
In her role with the AIDS Clinical Trials Group, Dr. Bender Ignacio serves as co-chair of two arms of the ACTIV-2 platform study and as vice-chair of the HAT-COVID study. She has been a member of the Comorbidities Transformative Science Group and the Antiretroviral Strategy TSG. She also serves as protocol co-chair of an HIV-associated cancer protocol within the AIDS Malignancy Consortium and is part of the U54 ULACNET Collaboracion Evita on HPV/HIV (NCI).
As medical director of the Fred Hutch's COVID-19 Clinical Research Center, she has overseen the conduct of several trailblazing COVID-19 therapeutic studies and has helped set the local and national COVID-19 research agenda.
In addition to clinical trials, Dr. Bender Ignacio's molecular and clinical epidemiology focuses on immune activation in HIV, co-infections, and HIV-associated cancers. Her work partners with investigators in Peru, Brazil, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and South Africa, including translational and implementation science around improving care to people with concurrent HIV and cancer in resource-constrained settings.