Anne E. Goldfeld, M.D. ‘81
Dominick P. Purpura Distinguished Alumnus Award
Dr. Anne Goldfeld’s work in infectious diseases has had a significant global impact. A professor of medicine and of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, she is also a senior investigator in the program of cellular and molecular medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T. C. Chan School of Public Health, and a physician in the division of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Her lab focuses on innate immune gene expression and on the identification of genes and immune mechanisms underlying susceptibility and resistance to lethal infections such as tuberculosis (TB) and HIV and, more recently, Ebola virus and SARS-CoV-2. After working in a Cambodian refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border, where she was at the origin of efforts to ban landmines, in 1994 she co-founded a nongovernmental organization, the Cambodian Health Committee (CHC), to address the lack of TB care in that war-torn country. With local CHC colleagues she pioneered an approach of community-based TB care and later initiated antiretroviral therapy (ART) for HIV infection, TB/HIV care, and therapy for drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) in the country. In tandem, her lab identified key immune mechanisms underlying the onset of TB and TB/HIV; and, with Cambodian and French colleagues showed that earlier ART in TB/HIV co-infection dramatically improves survival, changing WHO recommendations. In 2008, she founded an international nonprofit in Africa, the Global Health Committee, which initiated the countrywide program for DR-TB treatment in Ethiopia providing access to the poorest in the country while helping scale-up the countrywide program. Dr. Goldfeld has received numerous honors, including the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award from Tufts University and the Eliasson Global Leadership Prize from the Tällberg Foundation. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, earned her M.D. with distinction at Einstein, and completed internship and residency training in internal medicine and a fellowship in infectious diseases at the Massachusetts General Hospital.