MD
Harvard Medical School
MSc, Health Policy and Finance
London School of Economics, UK
Margaret (Molly) McNairy, MD, MSc is a clinician-scientist trained in internal medicine. She is an assistant professor of medicine and the Bonnie Johnson Sacerdote Clinical Scholar in Women’s Health at Weill Cornell Medicine. Her research focus is on improving the delivery of HIV care in resource-poor settings around the globe. Her work aims to reduce HIV-related mortality and decrease HIV transmission among vulnerable populations.
During the past decade, Molly has worked in multiple countries in sub-Saharan Africa, where she has collaborated with various national governments to provide and expand HIV care and treatment to vulnerable populations. Through her work, she and others have identified a critical gap in current models of HIV care in which up to half of patients who test HIV positive do not link to care and among those who do link to care, up to third default from care after one year. Non-enrollment in or withdrawal from care means that about half of patients are not receiving life-saving medications. As a result, these patients experience declining health and death, and they continue to transmit the virus to others, including their children and partners.
In effort to address this problem, Dr. McNairy began to look for novel models of HIV care that could improve patients’ ability to engage in care, take their medications, and lead healthy lives. Her research evaluates multi-level interventions that address structural, biomedical and behavioral barriers to engagement in long-term HIV care.