Research Interests
I am interested in all current methods of cervical cancer screening and treament both in developed and developing countries.
I am very experienced at colposcopy as well as in both surgical and ablative therapies for premalignant diseases of the cervix. I have lectured in North Carolina, Virginia, Tanzania, Peru and Saudi Arabia on HPV biology and cervical cancer screening. I previously was the Director of The Cervical Cancer Screening and Prevention Clinic at Duke University where I spend 20 hours per week in direct patient care, resident and student education. In this role I have been able to collaborate with Dr. Nimmi Ramanujam in Biomedical Engineering and her lab to look at innovative way of screening and treatment for precancerous diseases of the uterine cervix.
I was also member of the Duke Global Health Institute and in this role I attended and formally consulted in the Women's Reproductive Health Center at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center in Moshi Tanzania. In this role we saw a tremendous number of patients with a huge range of pathology. Cervical cancer remains the number one cancer killer of women in Subsaharan Africa as well as many developing nations and are working hard to create a sustainable and accurate way to see and treat cancer precursors to change this tragic statistic. To this end I have worked with colleagues in Africa, India, Honduras, and Peru. In addition to global outreach I also want to use this technology to bring reliable screening and treatments to underserved parts of our own country. This includes inner city populations as well as rural areas such as Appalachia where access to health care is extremely limited.
I have also worked in collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Smith at UNC to compare accuracy and patient acceptability of self-testing for HPV as a primary screening technique as well as extended HPV genotype testing.