Dr. Steven Deeks Receives Mentoring Honor

Veteran HIV researcher and clinician Steven Deeks, M.D., will receive the 2022 Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Faculty Mentoring Program during a reception on August 12.

Dedicated to AIDS research and clinical care for nearly three decades, Dr. Deeks has become a leading light in the search for an HIV cure and a champion of pooling resources and working together.

“Steve is well known to pretty much everyone in HIV research for his generous, collaborative spirit,” says Dr. Rowena Johnston, amfAR VP and director of research. In a recent interview, Dr. Deeks said, “I like collaborating with others; that’s where I find the magic.”

As the principal investigator of the amfAR Institute for HIV Cure Research, Dr. Deeks leads a potentially groundbreaking clinical trial that is testing a combination of agents in an effort to induce post-treatment control in people living with HIV. The complex, multi-stage trial is the culmination of four years of work by teams of researchers at the Institute, which amfAR launched in 2016 with a five-year $20 million grant to UCSF, where Dr. Deeks is a professor of medicine. 

He is also one of the principal investigators of DARE (the Delaney AIDS Research Enterprise), a collaborative network of researchers focused on therapeutic interventions to cure HIV. He codirects the SCOPE HIV observational study, a cohort of HIV-positive and negative individuals of diverse demographic and clinical backgrounds whose clinical data and biological specimens have become the foundation of studies focused on reducing HIV-associated inflammation during therapy and on reducing the size of the HIV reservoir, among other research avenues.

Dr. Deeks is a faculty member in the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General. He also maintains a primary care clinic for people living with HIV.

In the course of his work, he has helped to nurture the next generation of researchers and clinicians. Dr. Deeks has helped train dozens of students, residents, fellows, and junior faculty, and is the recipient of two consecutive National Institutes of Health (NIH) mentoring grants. He co-directs an NIH HIV/AIDS research training program and also co-chairs an annual three-day mentoring retreat in South Africa that enrolls cure-focused early-stage investigators from around the world.