Dr. Kenneth Mayer is a Professor of Medicine and Community Health at Brown University, the Director of Brown University AIDS Program, and the Chief of the Infectious Disease Division of Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island (Pawtucket). While doing his fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Harvard Medical School at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dr. Mayer was one of the first clinicians in Boston to see patients with AIDS and HIV infection. He is also the Medical Research Director of the Fenway Community Health Center in Boston where he has conducted studies of the natural history and transmission of HIV in gay men since the start of the epidemic.

Dr. Mayer has also been the Principal Investigator of a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease-funded study of the heterosexual transmission of HIV in Southeastern New England and is currently a Co-Principal Investigator of the Centers for Disease Control-funded HIV Epidemiology Research (HER) Study of the natural history of HIV in women. He is also the Principal Investigator of the New England Vaccine Preparedness Cohort Study of the National Institutes of Health's national HIV vaccine field trial effort, known as HIVNET.

In 1983, Dr. Mayer co-authored one of the first books about AIDS for the general public, The AIDS Fact Book. Dr. Mayer had collaborated with other researchers to define the seroepidemiology and early spread of HIV in Boston and to assess the spread of HIV in both homosexual and heterosexual communities. Dr. Mayer has also collaborated with basic virologists and immunologists to further characterize the genetics and immunopathology of HIV disease. He was a co-investigator in early studies of d4t and Peptide T. He is now on the National Board of Directors of the American Foundation for AIDS Research and served on the Data, Safety, and Monitoring Boards of the National Institutes of Health's AIDS Clinical Trials Unit. He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Clinical Microbiology and AIDS Alert. He has published extensively about AIDS covering topics concerning the natural history, behavioral epidemiology, transmission variables, and public policy aspects of the epidemic.

Support for Dr. Mayer's coverage of ICAAC 98 at The Body is provided by Bristol-Myers Squibb Immunology.