PATRICIA L HIBBERD, MD, PhD
Patricia Hibberd received her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at King's College, University of London in 1975 and was award her PhD degree in Information Science/Epidemiology in 1978. After her post doctoral fellowship at the University of Leicester, she came to the United States in 1980 as a junior faculty member, to work with Drs Paul Stolley and Brian Strom, internationally recognized leaders in Epidemiology, at the University of Pennsylvania. She was inspired to pursue medical training and graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1986. After training in internal medicine and infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, she was appointed Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1990. She quickly rose to the rank of Associate Professor in 1997 at Harvard Medical School. In 1998, she moved to Children's Hospital Boston as the founding Director and Head of the Clinical Research Program. There she developed a Department with 45 faculty/staff that supported the clinical research mission of the hospital. In 2001, she moved to Tufts University as the founding Director and Head of the Clinical Research Institute, where she developed a hospital wide program to lead and support clinical and translational research. She was appointed Professor of Medicine, Pediatrics and Public Health at Tufts University School of Medicine. In 2006, she was tapped by Tufts University School of Medicine to head up the Center for Global Health Research to extend her work to the University's core mission of Internationalism. The mission of the Global Center for Health Research is to develop and promote active partnerships with institutions in the US and overseas for research, teaching and service; provide support, mentoring and training of junior faculty in the US and overseas in research excellence; develop programs particularly relating to closing the gap in health disparities worldwide.
Throughout her career, Dr Hibberd has focused on bringing her extensive methodologic skills to a research agenda on the prevention and treatment of childhood pneumonia and diarrhea - the number 1 and 2 killers of children aged 2-59 months worldwide. Her approach has been to partner and, where appropriate, mentor partners and collaborators to ensure that the research is of the highest quality and can impact policy. Her work on diarrheal diseases has included studies in the slums of Lima, Peru; studies on safe water to prevent childhood diarrhea in Benin and Tunisia and ongoing studies of cryptosporidial diarrhea in Vellore, India. In collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Harvard Institute for International Development/Boston University's School of Public Health, Center for International Health on treatment of childhood pneumonia in two large multi-center multi-country international clinical trials. These trials published in leading journals such as the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, now provide much of the data that are being used to change WHO guidelines for the treatment of acute respiratory infections and pneumonia worldwide. These studies are also being used by WHO/UNICEF's Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia (GAPP), as a basis for the next research priorities. Dr Hibberd has also continued to conduct additional studies in childhood pneumonia in collaboration with her longstanding colleague from Nagpur, India, Dr Archana Patel. In June 2008, Drs Hibberd and Patel were awarded a grant from NIH's National Institute for Child Health and Human Development to join the Global Network for Women's and Children's Health Research. The mission of NIH's Global Network is to prevent maternal and infant deaths and illnesses worldwide, improving the health of mothers and infants, building local capacity for doing research, and strengthening scientific and community partnerships. Drs Hibberd and Patel join 6 other Global Network sites worldwide. Dr Hibberd has also had the great privilege to be a collaborator on one of the Gates Grand Challenges in Global Health Projects. Under the leadership of Dr A Sonnenshein and in collaboration with Dr G Keusch, S Tzipori and M Stadecker, this project focuses on the development of a heat stable vaccine for childhood diseases. Dr Hibberd is responsible for the preparation and development of the Phase I, first in man studies that will test the newly developed vaccine, prior to scale up for future international trials.
Dr Hibberd has published more than 100 peer reviewed papers, many of which are dedicated to global health, she has 4 current NIH grants, funding from the Gates Foundation and she has mentored more than 30 junior faculty/fellows, several of whom have successful research careers in global health. Throughout her post MD career, she has remained a practicing infectious diseases physician.