Polly Harrison, Senior Advisor

Polly joined AVAC in January 2010 as a Senior Advisor and supports AVAC's work to monitor the prevention research field and mobilize political, financial and community support for prevention research. Polly advises on AVAC's policy activities, particularly those related to US federal research funding and implementation. As former director the the Alliance for Microbicides, Polly supports the integration of the Alliance's resources to AVAC and their expansion to serve as both technical resources as well as management tools for trial funders, sponsors, scientists, developers, trial implementers and policy makers. Within this work, Polly supports the development and distribution of pipeline and clinical trial updates. In addition, Polly is involved in the organizing of a think tank on site coordination, and supporting the HIV Vaccines and Microbicides Resource Tracking Working Group, including the expansion of forecasts on future costing and investments in prevention research.

Polly founded and served as director of the Alliance for Microbicide Development from February 1998 to January 2010. She was Senior Program Officer and Director of International Health at the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, where she founded the Forum on HIV/AIDS Research and Forum on Emerging Infections, and led major studies on critical aspects of international health, infectious disease, reproductive health, and public-/private-sector responses to global health challenges.

Prior to that,  Polly spent two decades living and working in the developing world as a medical anthropologist, policy analyst, faculty member of the Development Studies Program, and Regional Social Science Advisor for USAID. She has since sustained those commitments as a Governing Councilor of the American Public Health Association, Fellow of the American Anthropological Association, Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies, member of the Board of the BioDesign Institute and the Scientific Advisory Group of the CONRAD Program, and ad hoc membership on numerous advisory panels for the National Institutes of Health. Her undergraduate and graduate degrees are from Mount Holyoke College and the Catholic University of America, respectively.

In 2004, Polly was selected by Scientific American as a Policy Leader within the "Scientific American 50", the magazine's prestigious annual list recognizing outstanding leadership in science and technology for that year and in April 2006 received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the "Microbicides 2006" biennial global conference. Polly's commitment to microbicides came from years of commitment to the belief that all women, those she got to know living in the developing world, her friends, and her daughters and granddaughters, have an inalienable right to those benefits of science that can make them powerful, knowledgeable, and safe.