Richard D'Aquila
Dr. D’Aquila is the Howard Taylor Ricketts Professor of Medicine, Infectious Diseases, at the Feinberg School of Medicine. He is also founding director of the Northwestern Medicine HIV Translational Research Center laboratory, which works to discover and develop new medicines for the cure and prevention of HIV, and the Third Coast Center for AIDS Research (CFAR), an NIH P30-funded center led by Northwestern that fosters interdisciplinary HIV research growth with other University and community partners in Chicago.
As an associate vice president, Professor D’Aquila is responsible for clinical research. He also oversees the following University Research Institutes and Centers: the Northwestern Synchrotron Research Center, the Center for Synthetic Biology, the Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology, and the Center for Reproductive Sciences.
Dr. D’Aquila earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Yale University and an MD degree at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He completed his medical residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, followed by fellowships in infectious diseases and molecular virology at Yale Medical School. He then served on the faculty at Yale before moving to the leading research group undertaking bench-to-bedside development of combinations of multiple antiretroviral therapy (ART) medicines at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He was chosen to lead the Infectious Diseases Division of the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt, before moving to Northwestern in 2012. He is an associate director of NUCATS, Northwestern’s clinical and translational research institute, where he directs the Center for Clinical Research. D’Aquila also currently directs an NIH-funded program project that aims to sustain remission and stop aging-accelerating inflammation by enhancing cellular anti-HIV defenses before stopping ART, as well as other NIH-funded projects aimed at improving HIV prevention.