Frank Tanser
Professor Frank Tanser is a South African scientist whose research aims to evaluate and design intervention strategies to drive back the HIV epidemic and its negative consequences in communities hardest hit by the epidemic. His pivotal work over the past 25 years has provided substantial insights into the evolving and dynamic nature of the HIV epidemic and its key drivers, informing HIV prevention and treatment efforts in sub-Saharan Africa. His research into the population-level impacts of the antiretroviral therapy (ART) roll-out has led to wide-reaching and rapid changes to government policy on how ART programmes in South Africa are designed and implemented. In particular, a seminal study he published in one of the world’s leading scientific journals – Science – was the first to show that nurse-led and decentralised HIV programmes in rural areas could be successful in reducing HIV transmission at the population-level.
Frank holds masters degrees from Imperial College London and Rhodes University and a doctorate from UKZN. He is a faculty member at AHRI and professor of global health at Stellenbosch University. He has served as a consultant and advisor to several high-profile organisations including the Mailman School of Public Health, USAID, the Futures Group International and UNAIDS. He currently serves on the board of The Lancet HIV and was member of the international scientific and technical advisory committee to the executive director of UNAIDS.
Frank has published over 250 papers in high-ranking international journals and his research has been cited over 33 000 times. He has been the recipient of numerous scientific grants and has raised over $85-million in external research funding to date. He is the founding director of the Lincoln International Institute for Rural Health – an international institute set up to study the health of rural populations across the globe. He was also a founder member of the Africa Centre for Population Health in 1998, and was responsible for building Africa’s first comprehensive population-based GIS system at the centre. In 2017 Frank was honoured by the South African Medical Research Council with the gold medal scientific achievement award in recognition of the excellence of his research. The award recognises outstanding scientists who have undertaken seminal research that has impacted directly on the health of populations in developing countries. In 2019, The Royal Geographical Society awarded him the Back Award for “conducting applied research that has made an outstanding contribution to the development of national or international public policy”.
Get in touch with Frank via frank.tanser@ahri.org
Click here for a full list of publications.
Tanser Group
The Tanser research group at AHRI does work in the areas of population health intervention research, geospatial epidemiology of infectious disease and use of big-data for epidemiological application. Frank’s group is particularly interested in developing and testing HIV interventions that target the most vulnerable populations such as young women, highly mobile individuals, and vulnerable populations living in communities characterised by high levels of HIV-incidence.
Frank is currently Principal Investigator of five large-scale studies based at AHRI:
1. The changing face of HIV in the era of Covid-19: Maximising HIV incidence reduction through dynamic targeting of current and future distributions of acquisition risk (R01). NICHD.
This work will design future HIV prevention strategies for poor rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa, that will maximize HIV incidence reduction through targeting of the most vulnerable sub-groups. The project uses novel epidemiological and statistical methods to rapidly identify new emerging vulnerable groups with highest HIV incidence and design future intervention programs which will maximize HIV incidence reduction based on the dynamic needs of the most vulnerable sub-populations.
2. Home-Based Intervention to Test and Start (HITS): a community-randomized controlled trial to increase HIV testing uptake among men in rural South Africa (R01). NICHD.
This large-scale cluster randomized trial is a 2×2 factorial cluster randomized controlled trial in one of the world’s largest ongoing HIV cohorts aimed at enhancing both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for HIV testing.
3. Harnessing phone-based GPS technology to reach and intervene in mobile young populations at high risk of HIV acquisition in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. German Science Foundation.
This research is the first of its kind and seeks to harness smart-phone GPS technology as an innovative precision public health approach to intervene in young adults who are at the highest risk of HIV acquisition and poor treatment outcomes.
4. Quantification of patterns of multimorbidity to develop effective and efficient models of HIV, TB and NCD co-care in rural South Africa (R21). NICHD.
The goal of this project is to quantify the spatial structure and key determinants of the infectious (HIV and TB) and non-communicable disease (hypertension, diabetes and obesity) epidemics to inform design of an effective and efficient care delivery model relevant to the overlapping epidemics in SSA.
5. Causal Pathways to population health impact of HIV antiretroviral treatment (R01). NICHD.
This study seeks to understand the long-term population effects of the ART scale-up on HIV incidence and HIV-related mortality in a hyper-endemic rural South African population.
Meet the Team
Thulile Mathenjwa
Project manager
Thulile Mathenjwa has a background in nursing and holds a Masters in Population Studies from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is currently coordinating the HITS study that looks at whether giving a financial incentive together with an HIV decision support for men will reduce HIV viral load in the community and reduce mortality in men, as well as reduce new HIV infections in young women.
Sipho Zulu
PhD student
Sipho Zulu's PhD research focuses on the geographical distribution of Schistosomiasis-HIV coinfection and public health outcomes in the adult population in Hlabisa sub-district. He has research interests in parasites’ biology and distribution, parasitology coinfections as well as water and sanitation.
Adam Akullian
Research collaborator
Adam Akullian is a postdoctoral fellow at the Gates-Funded Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM). As a member of IDM’s research team, Adam focuses on spatial, mathematical, and epidemiological modeling of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa with the goal of informing effective public health interventions. He is also Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington in Seattle. Adam has a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Washington and an Sc.B in Environmental Science from Brown University.
Adrian Dobra
Research collaborator
Adrian Dobra is a data scientist whose methodological research focuses on the development of high-dimensional multivariate spatiotemporal models, on variable and model selection, and on graphical models. His current interests are related to human mobility and migration based on geolocated temporal data recorded by wearable sensors embedded in smartphones, and on unsolicited geotagged social media data. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington.
Benn Sartorius
Research collaborator
Benn Sartorius is an associate professor in Public Health Medicine at UKZN. His work focusses on spatial-temporal analysis of disease and mortality as well as associated determinants using advanced spatial statistics and modelling frameworks. At AHRI he is involved in a NIH R01 project ‘Can HIV Hot-Spots be eradicated? An intervention to decrease HIV transmission to young women in rural KwaZulu-Natal’. Benn also co-supervises PhD candidates with Prof Frank Tanser.
Diego Cuadros
Research collaborator
Diego Cuadros is an Assistant Professor from the Department of Geography and Geographical Information Science at the University of Cincinnati, USA. He earned his PhD in Biology at the University of Kentucky. His research focuses on understanding the spatial patterns of geographical distribution of infectious diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C virus. Diego is currently working with Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI), investigating the drivers of the geographical distribution of HIV infection in South Africa.
Selected Recent Publications
Akullian A, Vandormael A, Miller JC, Bershteyn A, Wenger E, Gareta D, Cuadros D, Bärnighausen T, Herbst K, Tanser F . Large age-shifts in HIV-1 incidence patterns in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. PNAS 2021; 118(28): e2013164118 .
Tanser F, Kim HY, Mathenjwa T, Shahmanesh M, Seeley J, Matthews P, Wyke S, McGrath N, Adeagbo O, Sartorius B, Yapa HM, Zuma T, Zeitlin A, Blandford A, Dobra A, Bärnighausen T . Home‐Based Intervention to Test and Start (HITS): a community‐randomized controlled trial to increase HIV testing uptake among men in rural South Africa. J Int AIDS Soc 2021; 24(2): e25665.
Kim H-Y, Dobra A, Tanser F. Migration and first-year maternal mortality among HIV-positive postpartum women: A population-based longitudinal study in rural South Africa. PLoS Medicine 2020; 17(3): e1003085.
Vandormael A, Akullian A, Siedner M, de Oliveira T, Bärnighausen T, Tanser F. Declines in HIV incidence among men and women in a South African population-based cohort. Nature Communications 2019; 10(1): 1-10.
Tanser F, Azongo DK, Vandormael A, Bärnighausen T, Appleton C. Impact of the scale-up of piped water on urogenital schistosomiasis infection in rural South Africa. eLife 2018; 7: e33065.
Tanser F, Vandormael A, Cuadros D, Phillips A, de Oliveira T, Tomita A, Bärnighausen T, Pillay D. (2017). Effect of population viral load on prospective HIV incidence in a hyper-endemic rural African community. Science Translational Medicine 2017; 9(420): eaam8012.
Tanser F, Bärnighausen T, Dobra A, Sartorius B. Identifying ‘corridors of HIV transmission in a severely affected rural South African population: a case for a shift toward targeted prevention strategies. International Journal of Epidemiology 2017; 47(2): 537-49.
Tanser F, Bärnighausen T, Grapsa E, Zaidi J, Newell M-L. (2013). High coverage of ART associated with decline in risk of HIV acquisition in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Science; 339(6122): 966-71.
Tanser F, Bärnighausen T, Hund L, Garnett GP, McGrath N, Newell M-L. (2011). Effect of concurrent sexual partnerships on rate of new HIV infections in a high-prevalence, rural South African population: a cohort study. The Lancet; 378(9787): 247-55.