Julie McElrath

Dr. Juliana McElrath (born January 9, 1951) is an American physician-scientist and HIV researcher. She serves as senior vice president and director of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and is a professor at the University of Washington.

McElrath established an international human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) vaccine laboratory. Her research focuses on HIV vaccine development, investigating the relationship between HIV and the immune system, and has received support from the National Institutes of Health as well as the Gates Foundation. She continued this focus during her time in New York City.

In 1988, McElrath became an assistant professor at Rockefeller University. In 1990, McElrath joined the University of Washington as an assistant professor and director of the HIV/AIDS Madison Clinic at Harborview Medical Center. Within two years, she returned to full-time research, focusing on the development of an HIV vaccine.

In 1996, McElrath joined the faculty at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She received a National Institutes of Health MERIT Award for her research and served as associate editor of The Journal of Infectious Diseases. In 2013, she helped launch Cape Town HVTN Immunology in Cape Town, South Africa.

In addition to her research, McElrath is an attending physician at Harborview Medical Center, the University of Washington Medical Center, and Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. She has authored or co-authored nearly 300 peer-reviewed publications primarily on HIV/AIDS. In 2007, she co-founded the Vaccine Infectious Disease Institute at Fred Hutchinson and has served as the director of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division since 2011. She continues to be involved in a global initiative to develop an HIV-1 vaccine and research aiming to identify innate and mucosal immune defences generated following vaccination.

McElrath has contributed to numerous integrated programs at the national and international levels to advance a coordinated effort to curb the HIV epidemic through prevention efforts. These include the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, the Gates Foundation Innate Immunity Consortium (PI), the Microbicide Trials Network (director, Immunology Core), and the Seattle Vaccine Trials Unit (PI).

Research in the McElrath Laboratory at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center includes studying how T cell memory is induced by natural infection and immunization. McElrath and her team are also working to identify the properties of T cells that confer containment or eradication of HIV-1. Their studies span a wide array of immunologic investigations in persons who experience unusual control of HIV-1 infection, including individuals with newly diagnosed infection, those with long-term non-progressive disease who control infection for more than a decade without antiretroviral treatment, and people repeatedly exposed but not infected. These clinical cohorts have been assembled for longitudinal studies in Seattle, as well as South Africa and Uganda, two nations where the HIV epidemic is widespread.

On December 1, 2015, the work of McElrath and HTVN scientists investigating a vaccine to potentially halt HIV and AIDS was highlighted in an HBO/VICE special report titled "Countdown to Zero."

Recognition McElrath has received awards such as the Burroughs Welcome Clinical Scientist Award in Translational Research, a National Institutes of Health Merit Award, and the GAIA Vaccine Foundation Award. She holds leadership roles at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and serves as principal investigator of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network Laboratory Program at the Ragon Institute.

Selected works