Written by Jake Stump
Photos by WVU Photography

The journey for one of the country’s leading experts in infectious diseases could have taken a swerve to astronomy or veterinary science.

Dr. Sally Hodder, director of the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute, housed at West Virginia University, didn’t always want to be a doctor. But her decision to become one led to one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine.

In October (2024), Hodder was elected to the National Academy of Medicine for her accomplishments as an infectious diseases physician and researcher. She is the first person from WVU to be chosen for the Academy. Despite a storied career up to this point, Hodder insists there’s more work for her to do.

Q: Was it always your career goal to become a doctor?

A: No. As a kid, I wanted to be an astronomer. Somewhere along the line though, I fell in love with living things. It was a choice between homo sapiens (medical school) and the rest of the animal kingdom (veterinary school). I chose the former.

Q: What led you down the path to specializing in infectious diseases?

A: Fabulous mentors who were the sharpest, kindest physicians I have ever had the privilege of working with – and they were all infectious disease physicians and they were all men. As a medical student at Case Western Reserve University and through post-graduate training at the University of California at San Francisco and Case Western Reserve University, I was so fortunate to work closely with the likes of Drs. Charles Carpenter, Adel Mahmoud, Oscar Ratnoff — all men who could not have been more supportive and missed no opportunity to advance my career.

Q: How did you end up at WVU?

A: Through the efforts of a savvy recruiter. I’d never heard of WVU, much less the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute. A recruiter from Witt Kieffer convinced me to do a fly in, fly out interview with the search committee. I was intrigued with the position and, later, when invited to visit the WVU campus, I was impressed. I later accepted the job offer and rented a house for six months, figuring that they’d give me my old job back at Rutgers if I decided to not stay in West Virginia. I stayed and the rest is history.

Q: What’s a day look like for you leading the WVCTSI?

A: Never boring. Meetings span the spectrum but fall into three basic buckets: 1) working as an investigator with various research teams (this is my favorite bucket) – some conducting clinical trials with potentially game-changing drugs to prevent HIV acquisition, some addressing the problem of long-COVID with clinical trials as well as prospective longitudinal cohort studies, and some conducting large data-base studies on a variety of issues impacting health of West Virginians; 2) together with WVCTSI staff, core directors and investigators, creating and enhancing services and programs to engage community as well as investigators; and 3) working with Drs. Clay Marsh and Fred King and the entire Health Sciences leadership team to improve WVU programs and services such as clinical trial contracting.

Q: What do you think led to your election to the academy? Are there specific milestones and achievements that you think put you into that conversation?

A: The honest answer to your question is “I don’t know.” A theme throughout my professional career has been providing care and research access to underserved and underrepresented populations.

My HIV work prior to coming to WVU was well known. As vice president of Medical Affairs in the HIV franchise at Bristol-Myers-Squibb, I had the opportunity to collaborate on providing drugs for NIH HIV treatment trials in sub-Saharan Africa and on development of once daily HIV treatment regimens. Subsequently, I was recruited as director of HIV programs at New Jersey Medical School (NJMS-Rutgers) in Newark, where HIV prevalence was nearly 3% among the African American community. But (at that time) there was not an active NIH-funded adult HIV trial site at NJMS. As principal investigator of the NJMS team, we successfully competed for NIH-supported HIV treatment as well as prevention clinical trials, and our site consistently enrolled high numbers of Black/African Americans and women in clinical trials, groups that were historically underrepresented in U.S. HIV clinical trials.

At that time, Newark had the highest proportion of persons with HIV who were women, and much of my career has focused on HIV treatment and prevention among women. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, HIV among U.S. women was neither being addressed by U.S. government agencies nor pharma. I pushed for several years with fantastic collaborators across the U.S. for the NIH to fund a study of HIV acquisition among women most at risk in the U.S. and wrote a protocol that was subsequently funded by NIH through the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN). I served as protocol chair for this study (HPTN Study 064) that enrolled more than 2,000 U.S. women residing in high HIV prevalence and high poverty neighborhoods.

The study showed that HIV acquisition was ~six times more likely among the study population compared with a national population of similarly aged women. When the primary study results were presented nationally, CNN interviewed me regarding the study and the overlooked issue of HIV among U.S. women. With my collaborators and a PBS film editor, we created a short documentary film, “My America: Realities of Poverty and HIV” that included several of our study participants.

Nonetheless, despite my previous work in HIV, I think achievements the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute has been able to achieve with our collaborators across the state was an important factor in my election to the National Academy. It has really been the honor of my life to work with the many dedicated persons and organizations with whom I have had the opportunity to work building research infrastructure and programs to ultimately improve health outcomes in West Virginia.

Q: What’s left for you to do? What’s on your list?

A: Lots – there’s not enough room to publish the entire list. That said, I would like to devote much more time to writing.

Q: What do you enjoy in your time outside of work?

A: My golden retrievers, grandchildren, good friends, reading, cycling, opera, theater and travel.