As a recent medical school graduate of Cairo University, Wafaa El-Sadr arrived in the U.S. in 1976 confident that more training in medicine would help her meet the challenges of curing infectious diseases in poor countries around the world, like her native Egypt.

“Many of us in the infectious disease field believed we could have almost an immediate impact—we could treat people who were sick with an infection and get them well rapidly,” she said. “HIV changed that notion completely.”

Read the full interview on Columbia News