Myron S. Cohen
Myron S. Cohen is an American doctor and scientist who helped lead a landmark HIV prevention study. He directed the HIV Prevention Trials Network 052 (HPTN 052), which showed that treating an HIV-positive person with antiviral drugs greatly lowers the risk of passing the virus to a partner—by about 96%. This finding popularized the idea of “treatment as prevention.”
Cohen is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he holds chairs in medicine, microbiology and immunology, and epidemiology. He also serves as co-chair of the NIH’s HIV Prevention Trials Network. He joined UNC Chapel Hill in 1980.
Education and early work: Cohen grew up in Chicago. He earned a BS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MD from Rush Medical College, did internal medicine residency at the University of Michigan, and completed an infectious disease fellowship at Yale University.
Contributions and recognition: He was among the first to study how sexually transmitted infections influence HIV transmission and how HIV drugs reduce the amount of virus in genital secretions. This work led to the idea that people on treatment can be less contagious. He has received many honors, is a fellow of several medical societies, was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2012, and serves as editor of the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 11:16 (CET).