Sarah Rutstein, MD, PhD

Sarah Rutstein is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a health services researcher and infectious disease physician with expertise working with populations living with or at risk for HIV infection. Her research focuses on translation of efficacious interventions into clinical implementation in resource-limited settings through behavioral and biomedical clinical trials and cost-effectiveness analyses.

Dr. Rutstein has worked to develop HIV and sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevention and treatment practices and policies that efficiently prioritize scarce resources. Such strategies include early identification and intervention for persons with acute HIV infection, improved viral load monitoring for persons on antiretroviral therapy in sub-Saharan Africa, and risk-targeted prevention directly addressing the intersecting epidemics of HIV and bacterial STIs. Her modeling work includes a diverse collection of decision-analytic and predictive models, the outcomes for which have helped guide WHO policies for HIV testing and case finding – specifically, the use of assisted partner notification in sub-Saharan Africa. With a focus on efficient distribution of scarce resources, Dr. Rutstein has applied models of differentiated service delivery to examine new implementation strategies for HIV prevention and treatment programming, including integrating HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis into STI clinics in Malawi and examining strategies to identify persons most likely to benefit from longer-acting HIV treatment alternatives in Vietnam.