HIV/AIDS and Sub-Saharan Africa

Born in Cameroon, Boghuma Kabisen Titanji is a medical doctor and MPhil/PhD candidate at University College London. Her research into HIV drug resistant viruses seeks to better understand the mechanisms of drug resistance and to identify new ways of targeting resistant viruses.

During the course of her research, Titanji met a woman named Celine who forever changed the way she thinks about the people who sign informed consent agreements to be research subjects. Ever since, Titanji has been a vocal advocate for ethical medical research, calling for researchers to find less exploitative ways to study diseases in developing countries.- TED.com

Emily Oster, an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, has a history of rethinking conventional wisdom.

Her Harvard doctoral thesis took on famed economist Amartya Sen and his claim that 100 million women were statistically missing from the developing world. He blamed misogynist medical care and outright sex-selective abortion for the gap, but Oster pointed to data indicating that in countries where Hepetitis B infections were higher, more boys were born. Through her unorthodox analysis of medical data, she accounted for 50% of the missing girls. Three years later, she would publish another paper amending her findings, stating that, after further study, the relationship between Hepetitis B and mission women was not apparent. This concession, along with her audacity to challenge economic assumptions and her dozens of other influential papers, has earned her the respect of the global academic community.

She’s also investigated the role of bad weather in the rise in witchcraft trials in Medieval Europe and what drives people to play the Powerball lottery. Her latest target: busting assumptions on HIV in Africa.- TED.COM

Information and Videos Courtesy of TED.com