Leslie Marshall is a product development scientist and health research administrator with diverse practical experiences in academic, government, and industry settings. Over the past 25 years she has utilized her skills as a subject matter expert in preclinical drug and diagnostics development with a focus on products for women. As a Senior Science Advisor in the NIH Office of AIDS Research (OAR) she leads the Clinical Workstream within the Science team where her experience is being used to support a portfolio consisting of clinical research, women's health, biomedical prevention, HIV status and viral load testing, and neuroHIV. In collaboration with the NIH Office of Research on Women's Health she co-leads the NIH Signature Program on HIV and Women, which advances the NIH vision for women's health – a world in which every woman receives evidence-based care, prevention, and treatment tailored to their unique needs, circumstances, and goals. The program also supports women in science careers to meet their full professional potential. She enjoys utilizing her broad array of scientific and programmatic expertise to support innovative approaches and challenge dominant paradigms to tackle complex problems and achieve change that can impact the health of all women. She is committed to an intersectional, equity-informed, data-driven approach to research on HIV and women's health.
Prior to joining the NIH OAR, Leslie graduated in 2002 with a B.S. in Biology from Susquehanna University and completed a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology at Wake Forest University. She completed a research fellowship in the Laboratory of Molecular Medicine and Neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke studying the molecular basis for reactivation of JC virus from latency in immune cells and pathogenesis in the brain. Upon completion of her fellowship, she joined the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as a Contracting Officers Representative supporting contracts focused on preclinical development of nonvaccine HIV biomedical prevention (nBP) and pediatric HIV nBP and treatment products.
