In memoriam: Dr. Roger Detels, HIV/AIDS researcher and public health leader

Dr. Roger Detels, former dean and distinguished professor of epidemiology in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, died July 25.

Over the course of his illustrious career, which included 56 years of service to the school, Detels conducted research on air pollution, multiple sclerosis and other neurologic diseases, hypertension and several infectious diseases, including trachoma, capillariasis and Japanese encephalitis. Yet he is perhaps best known for his research on HIV/AIDS, which he began in 1981 when he initiated a natural history study of AIDS in young homosexual men in Los Angeles.

In 1983, Detels became the principal investigator of the Los Angeles Center for the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS), one of the largest natural history studies of HIV/AIDS in the world. MACS contributed some of the earliest evidence of the route of infection and risk activities for HIV transmission, along with the changes in the immune system in response to the virus, and Detels authored a landmark study showing that some men were resistant to HIV infection. Detels continued to head the Los Angeles site of MACS for decades, which has followed 6,972 gay and bisexual men since the dawn of the epidemic.

In 1988, Detels founded the UCLA/Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program (UCLA/Fogarty), through which more than 100 public health leaders from countries including Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Myanmar, India, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Hungary, and Brazil, received master's or doctoral degrees from Fielding School, and many more benefited from short-term training over the years. In the early years of the program, Detels often traveled to assist countries in the development of their systems to track the epidemic. Over time, graduates of the UCLA/Fogarty program have included two ministers of health, founders of two public health schools, directors of provincial and metropolitan CDC programs, chief epidemiologist for the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as numerous university professors.

Detels held many roles beyond his promotions from associate professor to distinguished professor. He served for five years as dean of UCLA Fielding, chair of the school's Department of Epidemiology for four years, as well as acting head and head of the Division of Epidemiology (before it was a department) for nine years total.

Read more at the Fielding School of Public Health website.