Meet Our Staff

Since our involvement in the first-ever HIV preventive vaccine study, our staff has remained dedicated to finding a vaccine to protect against HIV infection. Though we all love to joke and have fun, we take our work and efforts to find an HIV vaccine very seriously.

Our Front Office
At the Seattle HVTU our front desk personnel are the first people you’ll see. Their dedication to our work and charming personalities will no doubt leave lasting impression!

Michele Crist (Data manager)
Michelle is so dedicated to our vaccine unit that she has been with us for 16 years. In addition to greeting volunteers, Michele is our data manager. She reviews HVTN Datafax forms, and ensures the accuracy of and keeps up to date all our data. Michele loves to golf and sometimes thinks she missed her calling as a travel agent. If that’s true, we’re sure glad she did!

Janis Chin (Program Assistant)
Janis has so many roles we don’t know where to begin. She orders supplies, answers the phones, screens volunteers and processes specimens for the labs. Basically, she keeps the clinic running! In her spare time (we sometimes let her get away) she travels the world on public health service missions.

Noel Williams (Clinical Assistant)
Noel is another important member of our front office team. Her primary responsibility is to support our ancillary study staff but, like everyone else here, she does so much more. Noel assists with lab processing and phone screenings, and serves as a back up to Janis. Noel is fun loving, passionate about peace and a clean environment.

Gina Query (Regulatory Coordinator)
Gina is a native Washingtonian and is our regulatory coordinator who handles all of our submissions to regulatory bodies, such as the FHCRC's Institutional Review Board (IRB). Gina is also responsible for ensuring the unit's compliance with institutional, state and federal regulations. She writes all of the site's consent forms and assists with protocol development and implementation for many of the unit's ancillary projects.

Our Pharmacists
Our pharmacists administer and prepare vaccines, and keep all associated records.

Meredith Potochnic has been with our clinic since 1997, after moving to Seattle from Baltimore where she worked on AIDS clinical trials at Johns Hopkins University. Meredith works half time with the Seattle HVTU and the other half as an HIV/AIDS-specialty pharmacist at Madison Clinic (Harborview Medical Center). Meredith job shares with Bobby Santucci, the newest addition to our pharmacy staff. Bobby loves administering vaccines because it allows him to interact with our volunteers. In his own words, “This is the perfect job.”

Our Docs
Our staff physicians provide medical supervision and oversight for the medical activities of the unit, including management of adverse reactions, diagnostic evaluations for HIV-1 infection, and physician referrals.

Julie McElrath, MD, PhD (Principal Investigator)
Dr. McElrath, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center member and UW Professor of Medicine has 10 years of experience providing the overall leadership of the Seattle HVTU. She is a lead scientist on all Seattle HVTU studies, Director of Laboratory Programs with the HVTN and \also has many of her own research projects that support the HIV vaccine effort. In addition to her lab work, she oversees the HVTU personnel and takes responsibility for all the budgets and subcontracts. Besides her work with the unit, she travels the world talking about HIV vaccines, securing study grants and keeping us all in check!

Karen Mark , MD, MPH (Clinic Director)
Dr. Mark is part of the leadership team for the clinic. She is board certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases and has 6 years of experience working in HIV and STD research.  These include working for a year in Zambia, Africa, as a Project Manager of an HIV prevention research project and 2 years as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention focusing on STD prevention.  She is a proficient Spanish speaker, has spent time volunteering in rural Mexico and Bolivia, and worked for 3 years at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, a Los Angeles County public hospital, taking care of predominantly Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants as well as a diverse group of other patients including African Americans and other Latinos.  More recently Dr. Mark has followed a diverse panel of HIV-infected patients at the Madison Clinic at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle for the past 3 years while completing her Infectious Diseases fellowship and doing research on genital herpes. As Clinic Director she will work closely with Julie McElrath to make sure that things run smoothly. We not only appreciate her for her guidance and expertise but also for her great spirit!

Janine Meanza, MD works in our clinic one day a week to help with screenings and provide clinical assistance. We can always count on her for a smile, a kind word and great medical advice!

Our Clinical Staff
Our clinical staff makes sure that every volunteer receives the best personal attention and care in participating in one of our vaccine studies. They are the heart of the clinic and enroll each volunteer who is willing to participate in the fight against HIV.

David Berger, RN (Clinic coordinator)
David has been with us so long we can’t even remember when he started. Rumor has it that it’s been 16 years. David’s long history with the HVTU had made us one of the top sites within the HVTN. With his knowledge and abilities to enroll large number of volunteers, we are able to have more and more research studies.

Chris Galloway, ARNP (Nurse practitioner)
Chris recently celebrated her 10th year with the unit. When she is not here working with volunteers, you may catch her on a Monday night watching her favorite team the Green Bay Packers.

Our Ancillary Team
Jean Lee, ARNP and Julie Czartoski, ARNP conduct studies that support the HIV vaccine research directed by Dr. Julie McElrath. These studies involve HIV positive, long-term non-progressors, HIV exposed but HIV negative volunteers and HVTN lab controls. Data from these studies may provide key information that assists with the development of HIV vaccines. This is where it all begins.

Our Community Education and Recruitment Team
Kim Louis and David Garcia head up our community education and recruitment team. They are constantly working in the community to educate about HIV vaccine research and looking for those dedicated people who want to be in our studies.

Kim Louis' (Recruitment Manager) daily work includes, speaking to volunteers over the phone or e-mail and developing new creative advertising. When she's not chatting with someone about our newest study, she's supervising the Recruitment Team. When you contact the HVTU, you may get to talk with her!

David Garcia (Community Educator) is our newest addition to the team and comes to us from Houston, Texas via the Midwest where he completed research in a population health fellowship with the University of Madison. He has about ten years of work experience within HIV prevention and in community mobilization efforts for public health. His interests include music, film, art and talking ad nauseam about his favorite Texan, Beyonce.

Jarred, Patrick, Amanda and Kimberly are also part of our Recruitment Team. When they are not working their full time jobs elsewhere, they work for us part-time. You may see them out in the bars or at local events trying to talk to people about volunteering. We wouldn’t be able to find our great volunteers without them!

Our Community Advisory Board
We can’t forget about our Community Advisory Board (CAB). These dedicated, caring individuals help us keep a community perspective throughout our research process. In addition to attending monthly meetings, they serve on local and global working groups, research study committees and serve as spokespersons for our HIV vaccine studies.