Faculty

Dr. Robert R. Redfield
Co-Founder of the IHV
Professor of Medicine;
Professor of Microbiology and Immunology;
Director of Clinical Care and Research;
Associate Director of The IHV;
Associate Chair of Finance, Department of Medicine;
Division Chief, Infectious Diseases

rredfield@ihv.umaryland.edu

The Institute of Human Virology was co-founded by Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the IHV's Director of Clinical Care and Research. An Army researcher who worked with AIDS patients early in the epidemic, it was Dr. Redfield who first demonstrated the heterosexual transmission of the HIV virus, who developed the first clinical staging system - now used around the world - and who originated efforts to examine viral replication and viral load at all stages of disease.

Long at the forefront of therapeutic treatment for HIV infection, Dr. Redfield is a pioneer in clinical research whose most notable career accomplishments have been advocating the idea of translational research and the application of knowledge gained from laboratory-based studies to the actual patient population.

Dr. Redfield's career choice was heavily influenced by family background. His father was a National Institutes of Health scientist who died when Bob was 5; his mother was a biochemist who spent her entire career at NIH.

Early on, Dr. Redfield became interested in cancers and the role that viruses play in their development. He spent each of his summers during college working as a research scientist in the Columbia University Laboratory of Dr. Sol Spiegleman, whose research was focused on defining the role of retroviruses in human disease. Meanwhile, a promising young scientist, Robert Gallo, was beginning his career at the National Institutes of Health. Redfield was finishing his residency when Dr. Gallo announced his discovery of HTLV-1, the first retrovirus and one of the first viruses known to cause a cancer.

Dr. Redfield graduated from the Georgetown University School of Medicine and conducted postgraduate training in Internal Medicine and Infectious Disease at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He retired there in 1995, committed to building an Institute that aggressively moved research observations from the laboratory to the clinic to speed the pace of progress and to offer new treatment strategies for those suffering from chronic viral disorders.