Dr. Jennifer Downs

Jennifer Downs, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Center for Global Health at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, and a Lecturer in Medicine at Weill Bugando School of Medicine in Mwanza, Tanzania. She is a physician-scientist who practices, teaches, and conducts research in Mwanza. She is board-certified in internal medicine and infectious diseases and is an alumna of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York (class of 2004). She completed her internal medicine residency at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York in 2007 and her infectious diseases fellowship at Weill Cornell Medical College in 2010. She also obtained a Master’s of Science degree in clinical epidemiology at Weill Cornell (2011) and a PhD in parasitology at Leiden University in the Netherlands (2016).

Dr. Downs’s research interests include HIV prevention in rural women, with a particular focuson the parasitic worm infection schistosomiasis and its interaction with HIV infection. Other major areas of focus have been adolescent girls, sexually-transmitted infections, and the conduct of cluster-randomized trials in rural Tanzanian communities to promote HIV prevention. Dr. Downs’s research has been supported by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr. Downs also trains and mentors students interested in global health careers including undergraduate students from Cornell University, graduate students from the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, medical students from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and Qatar, and postgraduate students and junior faculty members at Bugando Medical Centre in Tanzania. She co-founded the Women in Global Health Research Initiative at Weill Cornell in 2014 and has a particular interest in fostering the careers of women scientists in global health.