Assistant Professor of Medicine
Emory University School of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases
Dr. Lauren Collins (MD, MSc) is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Emory University. She attends on the inpatient ID/HIV services at Grady Memorial Hospital and is a primary care physician at the Grady Ponce de Leon Center in the Adult and Women’s clinics, where she also serves as the Medical Director of the long-acting injectable antiretroviral therapy program.
Dr. Collins’s clinical and research interests focus on improving the care of persons with HIV and in particular, women with HIV across the lifespan and those affected by the Southern HIV/AIDS epidemic. In her research, she studies the mounting burden of aging-related comorbidities experienced by persons with HIV and investigates the role of sex differences as well as traditional versus HIV-specific risk factors contributing to overall comorbidity burden with the goal of improving comorbidity screening and prevention strategies in persons aging with HIV. She is also interested in leveraging long-acting antiretroviral therapy as a tool to help End the HIV Epidemic through mixed methods and implementation science research.
Dr. Collins is a co-investigator of the NIH-funded MACS/WIHS Combined Cohort Study (MWCCS), the Study of Treatment And Reproductive Outcomes (STAR), and the Emory Specialized Center of Research Excellence (SCORE) on Sex Differences, prospective longitudinal cohorts of persons with and without HIV with an emphasis on women in the U.S. South. Her work has been supported by a KL2 Scholarship supported by the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance; an NHLBI Loan Repayment Award; the Program for Retaining, Supporting, and EleVating Early-career Researchers at Emory (PeRSEVERE) supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation COVID-19 fund to retain clinician scientists; and most recently a K23 Award from the National Institute on Aging for a project focused on building evidence for multimorbidity screening and prevention in HIV by sex.