Alumni profile: Tinkhani Mbichila, MD

Tinkhani is a first year MPH – Epidemiology student at UC Berkeley. For the past six years he has been active in medical practice, senior management, and clinical research. He completed his medical training at University of Malawi College of Medicine in 2011 before serving as a district medical officer within the Ministry of Health in Malawi. His experience of treating patients in rural communities in Malawi led him to embrace a deeper interest in public health approaches to infectious disease prevention. He has vested research interests in global health, prevention and control of infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria. This passion for infectious disease epidemiology led him to join HIV/AIDS prevention clinical research at the University of North Carolina research Project in Lilongwe where he is a local lead co-investigator under the HIV Prevention Clinical Trials Network (HPTN).

For the past three years, he has been studying the development of novel HIV prevention options for women in Sub –Saharan Africa who are disproportionately affected by HIV. These PrEP HIV studies are HPTN 077, a phase 2 study to evaluate safety of injectable Cabotegravir for HIV prevention, HPTN 084, a Phase III clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy of injectable Cabotegravir for prevention of HIV compared to oral Pre-exposure prophylaxis (Truvada), and the AMP study that is evaluating VRC01, a broadly neutralizing monoclonal antibody, for HIV prevention. The Global health Gilead fellowship at UC Berkeley came off as a great opportunity to advance his skills and knowledge in infectious disease epidemiology to improve the health of all people at a global scale.