Virginia Fonner PhD, MPH

Biography

Virginia “Ginny” Fonner is an Assistant Professor within the Division of Global and Community Health in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). She earned her M.P.H and Ph.D. in the Social and Behavioral Interventions program from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Fonner began her career in global health as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Zambia where she served as an HIV/AIDS Community Mobilizer in a rural area for two years. Her work largely focuses on HIV prevention in low- and middle-income countries, specifically in sub-Saharan Africa. Her research interests include developing community-based interventions for HIV prevention, synthesizing research to assess intervention effectiveness through systematic reviews and meta-analysis, understanding social and behavioral aspects of biomedical interventions, integrating HIV and non-communicable disease prevention and care, and investigating gendered aspects of HIV prevention and health-related partner communication. Dr. Fonner is primarily funded through NIH (NIMH and Fogarty International Center). She is the Principal Investigator on an R21 assessing the potential for a family-based intervention for people living with HIV and a non-communicable disease (diabetes and/or hypertension) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  She is also a Co-Investigator on several R01s involving HIV self-testing, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), integration of HIV and NCDs, and systematic review and meta-analyses.