Eleanor Magongo, MD

Eleanor Namusoke Magongo is a Pediatrician & Child Health Specialist with 15 years’ experience leading teams at facility, district, regional and national level to design, implement, monitor and scale up pediatrics and adolescent HIV programs in Uganda. She has worked at the Ministry of Health, AIDS Control Program for almost ten years now, and she leads the national program for children and adolescents living with HIV. She successfully led the development of a decentralized HIV Drug Resistance (HIVDR) and third-line ART program in Uganda, a model program on the African continent.

Dr. Magongo’s research interest is in HIV viral load suppression and HIV drug resistance. She has committed her efforts to design strategies to improve viral load suppression and to prevent development of HIV drug resistance among children and adolescents living with HIV. She has established the Uganda Pediatrics ART (UP-ART) cohort in Uganda, that has a nested HIVDR sub-study. The HIVDR sub-study will assess; a) assess HIV drug resistance profile at initiation of ART among treatment naïve children and adolescents and the impact on their response to ART, b) using a nested case control study of children and adolescents on stable ART at transition to DTG, compare the difference in proportion with ‘baseline’ viremia and detectable major HIV drug resistance at DTG start among those who are viraemic (VL>1000 copies, confirmed or unconfirmed at 12 months of DTG, ‘cases’) compared to those suppressed (VL<1000 copies at 12 months of DTG, ‘controls’),  c) among children and adolescents who experienced virological failure on DTG (confirmed VL>1000 copies), describe the resistance profile at time of confirmed failure. Dr. Magongo received a grant from the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care (IAPAC) to conduct a study; Determining the Effectiveness and Outcomes of Dispensing Messages (DEDIM) on Adherence and Viral Suppression among Children with an Unsuppressed Viral Load in Uganda.

She is a member of the WHO Adolescent HIV Service Delivery Technical Working Group (ASWG), Child Survival Working Group (CSWG) and WHO HIVReSNet Steering Group. She is a Co-Chair of WHO HIVResNET Governance and Enabling Mechanism Working Group. Dr. Magongo has participated in development of WHO-lead technical briefs for children and adolescents living with HIV. She is a member of the NIH-Fogarty funded Adolescent HIV Prevention and Treatment Implementation Science Alliance (AHISA). She is the founder of the Pediatrics and Adolescent HIV Learning Collaborative for Africa (PAHLCA), a meeting that brings together Ministry of Health Pediatrics and Adolescent HIV program managers and their respective country stakeholders from over 31 African countries to promote peer-to-peer learning. Dr. Magongo is also the founder of the International Pediatrics HIV/AIDS Symposium for Africa (IPHASA, WWW.IPHASA.ORG), an abstract-driven meeting, that provides a platform for young African researchers and different stakeholders, to share research findings on children and adolescents living with HIV. She has integrated Implementation Science Research capacity building sessions into the PAHLCA and IPHASA meetings. Dr. Magongo is a member of the scientific committee for the International Conference on AIDS and STI’s in Africa (ICASA).