Professor Anne De Groot (April 2004)



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"Yes!"

A positive, definite short answer in the affirmative — there will be an AIDS vaccine in our lifetime. The person who states this particular yes is Anne De Groot, associate professor of community health. And if you follow her around for five minutes you will believe it. But it's not at all easy as that….

Dr. De Groot is just one of 50 panelists, speakers and provocateurs who assembled at Brown for the Brown University Pandemic AIDS Symposium, April 23-25, 2004. The symposium upheld the interdisciplinary spirit behind all things Brown: the morning began with a squadron of student volunteers spreading out across Providence to partner with public school teachers for a half-day in-service training where teachers learned to teach about HIV/AIDS. An ongoing exhibit examining the changing art of social activism was on display at the Watson Institute for International Studies, and filmmaker Rory Kennedy '91 returned to campus to screen her film Pandemic: Facing AIDS, which she directed and co-produced. Scientists, activists and health policy makers from around the globe descended on Brown to share, debate and discuss the pandemic — all with the goal of nudging the world closer to the "yes" it so desperately needs to hear.

With this remarkable congregation of talent surrounding the symposium, how do you decide whom to follow around? Well, for this edition of Office Hours we followed Esquire's cue. The magazine included Dr. De Groot on their 2003 genius list. "It's nice to be recognized for my work instead of being called crazy," she told the Brown Daily Herald when the news of her inclusion on the list broke.

It's easy to see why she made Esquire's list. De Groot is tireless in her efforts to find an AIDS vaccine and in shaping public policies that will make it easier to do so. In addition to teaching and research at Brown, she is CEO of EpiVax, Inc., a biotech company in the Jewelry District specializing in the creation of bioinformatic tools. She is founder of GAIA, an organization dedicated to the discovery of a non-profit AIDS vaccine. She also brings help directly to the frontline of the pandemic in Mali, publishes the HIV Education Prison Project newsletter and is a ready spokesperson for these causes whenever and wherever she goes.

At a lecture at the Hope Club in Providence, she cited a tidal wave of numbers and statistics, as you might expect a scientist to do. But Dr. De Groot does it in a way that crosses freely over the bridge between science and humanitarianism, science and economics, and back again.

She speaks of the need for an 'Esperanto' vaccine, to deal with the ever-evolving 'dialects' that HIV speaks. She cites the security issues created by AIDS as rates soar in men enlisted in militaries across the developing world, how the disempowerment of women in some cultures makes them more susceptible to AIDS and worse, ostracized because of it. She speaks of how ‘the joy’ has left Africa as the pandemic decimates the population at rates beyond imagination. She can show even the most unaware person in America how they pay for AIDS each day in something as simple as the cost of a cup of coffee. "If half the coffee workers in Kenya have HIV, it's going to cost you more." She points out.

"The only thing that can really stop AIDS is a vaccine," she says, and then looks up from the lectern. "Where is our March of Dimes?" she asks, evoking the campaign that became a household name as it mobilized a nation to beat polio. "Where is our March of Dimes for AIDS?"

- Writer, Eric Beeman