Yukari C Manabe

Yukari C. Manabe also known as Yuka Manabe, MD, FIDSA, FRCP, is an American physician-scientist and Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She holds joint appointments in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Departments of International Health and Molecular Microbiology and Immunology. She is the founding Director of the Center for Innovative Diagnostics for Infectious Diseases (CIDID) at Johns Hopkins, and Director of Global Health Research and Innovation within the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health.

Her research focuses on rapid and point-of-care diagnostics for HIV, tuberculosis (TB), sexually transmitted infections, and respiratory viruses including SARS-CoV-2, with particular attention to resource-limited settings in sub-Saharan Africa. She has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed publications.

She is the daughter of Syukuro Manabe, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021.

After completing her residency in internal medicine at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and a fellowship in infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, she joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1999. The model showed that IRIS severity depended on antigen load at the time of immunosuppression, mirroring observations in HIV patients responding to antiretroviral therapy. In 2019, she founded CIDID https://jhcidid.org/, a centre funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health, which evaluates and accelerates rapid diagnostic tests across a range of infectious diseases.

Manabe and colleagues at IDI worked to integrate syphilis testing into existing HIV testing programs for pregnant women at Ugandan government health facilities, including through dual HIV/syphilis point-of-care platforms.

COVID-19 pandemic During the COVID-19 pandemic, Manabe contributed to the NIH Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) program, and CIDID was involved in evaluating SARS-CoV-2 rapid antigen tests submitted by manufacturers for Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA.

In 2020, she was quoted in The Washington Post as an early advocate for rapid home antigen testing, arguing that arming contact tracers with rapid antigen tests could be effective at identifying the most infectious cases.

A 2020 Viewpoint in JAMA, co-authored by Manabe, Sharfstein, and Armstrong, argued for broader COVID-19 testing strategies, including rapid antigen and self-administered tests, while noting that testing remained insufficient as a standalone public health measure.

In January 2022, during the Omicron wave, Manabe was interviewed by NPR on the correct use of rapid antigen tests, advising that tests were most sensitive when used with symptoms and recommending testing approximately three days after a known exposure.

Medical societies

Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP) – Listed in the Royal College of Physicians Annual Report 2021. Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (FIDSA)

Personal life Manabe is the daughter of Syukuro "Suki" Manabe (born September 21, 1931), a Japanese-American physicist and climatologist at Princeton University, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021 jointly with Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi for his contributions to the physical modelling of Earth's climate and the reliable prediction of global warming. Yukari's mother, Nobuko ("Noko") Nakamura, is a practitioner and teacher of Japanese tea ceremony. Her sister Nagisa owns and operates a certified organic farm in Princeton, New Jersey. Manabe is married to James Campbell, a Professor of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.