Dr.Lawrence Mwananyanda is a clinician/scientist with a wealth of experience in conducting medical and public health research. He has been Principal Investigator or Co-PI on multiple research project. His portfolio includes being the Director of the HIV Vaccines Trials Unit at the Botswana Harvard Partnership where he and colleagues worked on the first Phase 1 HIV vaccine trials to be conducted in Africa. His interest with HIV vaccines research continued with his stint at the Emory University under the Zambia HIV Research Project where they studied conformational changes of the HIV at infection in a cohort of discordant couples to aid in design of next generation HIV trial vaccines.
With colleagues at Boston University, Dr.Mwananyanda’s focus has been research on child survival. Ongoing research include the Zambia Pertussis RSV Infant Mortality Estimation Study (ZPRIME) Southern Africa Mother Infant Pertussis Study – Nasopharyngeal Carriage (SAMIPS-NPC), Zambia Infant Cohort Study (ZICS) whose overall goal is to determine if HIV-exposed but uninfected infants (HEU) infants born to HIV-infected mothers on antiretroviral therapy have increased morbidity and mortality, and to correlate maternal Immune Activation ( with infant clinical outcome, and immune dysregulation as a potential mechanism for the poor HEU outcome. All these studies are based in Lusaka, Zambia. Dr. Mwananyanda is also the Zambia Site Director for the Harvard-Boston University-Northwestern University-New Mexico Fogarty Global Health program.