Julia L. Marcus

Julia Lenore Marcus is an American public health researcher and infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on improving the implementation of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention in the United States. Marcus is also a popular science communicator, and has contributed to The Atlantic.

For Swiss dancer and choreographer, see Julia Marcus (dancer).
Julia Lenore Marcus
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley (PhD)
Scientific career
InstitutionsHarvard Medical School
ThesisMaximizing Effectiveness of HIV Preexposure Prophylaxis Among Men Who Have Sex with Men (2013)

Early life and education

Marcus attended Wesleyan University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in sociology and women's studies.[1][2] Her undergraduate thesis considered the criminalisation of sexual deviance.[1] She moved to the University of California, Berkeley for her graduate studies, where she worked toward a master's in public health. She was appointed as an epidemiologist for the sexually transmitted disease section at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. She eventually completed her doctoral degree in epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied the effectiveness of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) in men who have sex with men in the United States.[3] After earning her doctoral degree, Marcus moved to the research branch of Kaiser Permanente.[4] There she studied the life expectancy of people living with HIV, finding a dramatic increase in survival over time but a persistent gap compared to people without HIV.[3][5] Her research on hepatitis C treatment among Black patients at Kaiser Permanente led to the elimination of race-based treatment guidelines for hepatitis C infection by the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases.[6][7] She also studied the implementation of PrEP at Kaiser Permanente, including studies that are now cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as evidence of the effectiveness of PrEP.[8][9][10]

Research and career

In 2016, Marcus was appointed to the faculty in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute.[11] Her research focuses on optimising the implementation of PrEP, including the use of electronic health records and predictive analytics to improve PrEP prescribing.[9][11] In 2020, she received the Office of Disease Prevention's Early-Stage Investigator Lecture award[12] from the National Institutes of Health. The award[13] recognizes early-career prevention scientists who have not successfully competed for a substantial NIH-supported research project, but who have already made outstanding research contributions to their respective fields and are poised to become future leaders in prevention research.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Marcus has written about public health communication related to coronavirus disease, including what lessons could be learned from the HIV epidemic.[14] She took part in a CNN town hall on the pandemic, where she advocated for a harm reduction approach rather than “abstinence-only messaging.”[15] In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, HIV prevention campaigns often used moralistic and fear-based messaging, which tended to perpetuate stigma and drive people away from public health efforts.[16] Likewise, Marcus believed that shaming or policing people who were engaging in behaviors that were high risk for coronavirus transmission, including not wearing face coverings or having large gatherings, would be counterproductive.[17][18] She argued that public health messaging and policy related to coronavirus prevention, including face masks, should be compassionate rather than punitive and support people in overcoming their barriers to adopting preventive behaviors, similar to the approaches used by effective public health efforts to promote safer sex for HIV prevention.[19]

Selected publications
  • Volk, Jonathan E.; Marcus, Julia L.; Phengrasamy, Tony; Blechinger, Derek; Nguyen, Dong Phuong; Follansbee, Stephen; Hare, C. Bradley (2015-11-15). "No New HIV Infections With Increasing Use of HIV Preexposure Prophylaxis in a Clinical Practice Setting". Clinical Infectious Diseases. 61 (10): 1601–1603. doi:10.1093/cid/civ778. ISSN 1058-4838. PMC 4809999. PMID 26334052.
  • Marcus, Julia L.; Glidden, David V.; Mayer, Kenneth H.; Liu, Albert Y.; Buchbinder, Susan P.; Amico, K. Rivet; McMahan, Vanessa; Kallas, Esper Georges; Montoya-Herrera, Orlando; Pilotto, Jose; Grant, Robert M. (2013-12-18). "No Evidence of Sexual Risk Compensation in the iPrEx Trial of Daily Oral HIV Preexposure Prophylaxis". PLOS ONE. 8 (12): e81997. Bibcode:2013PLoSO...881997M. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0081997. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 3867330. PMID 24367497.
  • Marcus, Julia L.; Chao, Chun R.; Leyden, Wendy A.; Xu, Lanfang; Quesenberry, Charles P.; Klein, Daniel B.; Towner, William J.; Horberg, Michael A.; Silverberg, Michael J. (2016-09-01). "Narrowing the Gap in Life Expectancy Between HIV-Infected and HIV-Uninfected Individuals With Access to Care". Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes (1999). 73 (1): 39–46. doi:10.1097/QAI.0000000000001014. ISSN 1525-4135. PMC 5427712. PMID 27028501.

References
  1. "Theses, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies - Wesleyan University". www.wesleyan.edu. Retrieved 2020-07-18.
  2. "C*** Crazy". City Journal. 2015-12-23. Retrieved 2020-07-18.
  3. Marcus, Julia Lenore (2013). Maximizing Effectiveness of HIV Preexposure Prophylaxis Among Men Who Have Sex with Men (PDF). Berkeley, CA. OCLC 904238184.
  4. "Life Expectancy Gap Has Decreased But Still Persists for Individuals with HIV". Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. Retrieved 2020-07-18.
  5. "Narrowing the Gap in Life Expectancy for HIV+ Compared With HIV- Individuals". CROI Conference. Retrieved 2020-07-18.
  6. "HCV Guidance: Recommendations for Testing, Managing, and Treating Hepatitis C". HCV Guidelines. Retrieved 2020-08-17.
  7. Marcus, Julia L.; Hurley, Leo B.; Chamberland, S.; Champsi, J.H.; Gittleman, L.C.; Korn, D.G.; Lai, J.B.; Lam, J.O.; Pauly, M.P.; Quesenberry, C.P.; Ready, J.; Saxena, V.; Seo, S.I.; Witt, D.J.; Silverberg, M.J. (2018-03-11). "No Difference in Effectiveness of 8 vs 12 Weeks of Ledipasvir and Sofosbuvir for Treatment of Hepatitis C in Black Patients". Clin Gastroenterol Hepatol. 16 (6): 927–35. doi:10.1016/j.cgh.2018.03.003. PMC 5962408. PMID 29535057.
  8. "Effective HIV Prevention Strategies | HIV Risk and Prevention Estimates | HIV Risk and Prevention | HIV/AIDS | CDC". www.cdc.gov. 2019-11-12. Retrieved 2020-07-31.
  9. Marcus, Julia L.; Hurley, Leo B.; Krakower, Douglas S.; Alexeeff, Stacey; Silverberg, Michael J.; Volk, Jonathan E. (2019-10-01). "Use of electronic health record data and machine learning to identify candidates for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis: a modelling study". The Lancet HIV. 6 (10): e688–e695. doi:10.1016/S2352-3018(19)30137-7. ISSN 2352-3018. PMC 7152802. PMID 31285183.
  10. Venter, Willem D.F. (2016). "What does preexposure prophylaxis mean for treatment; what does treatment mean for preexposure prophylaxis?". Current Opinion in HIV and AIDS. 11 (1): 35–40. doi:10.1097/coh.0000000000000208. ISSN 1746-630X. PMID 26545265. S2CID 1682479.
  11. "Department of Population Medicine". populationmedicine.org. Retrieved 2020-09-04.
  12. "2020 Awardee". Office of Disease Prevention. Retrieved 2020-10-19.
  13. "Nomination and Selection Process". Office of Disease Prevention.
  14. "Julia Marcus, PhD, MPH, Author at Harvard Health Blog". Harvard Health Blog. Retrieved 2020-07-18.
  15. "Epidemiologist Warns 'All-Or-Nothing' Messaging On Coronavirus Can Backfire". huffpost.com. Retrieved 2020-09-04.
  16. Katwala, Amit (2020-06-27). "The rise of mask shaming reveals the tricky science of social change". Wired UK. ISSN 1357-0978. Retrieved 2020-07-18.
  17. Krasnoff, Barbara (2020-06-25). "How do you deal with people who refuse to wear a mask?". The Verge. Retrieved 2020-07-18.
  18. "Mask-Shaming Won't Work. Try These 5 Things Instead". Yes! Magazine. Retrieved 2020-07-18.
  19. "Why we need to market masks like condoms". CityNews Edmonton. 2020-07-03. Retrieved 2020-07-18.
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