Welcome to the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research & Chief Technology Officer

Georgetown University is dedicated to conducting nationally and globally significant research that fosters greater insight and cross-cultural understanding, and addresses some of today’s critical societal challenges.

The Office of the Senior Vice President for Research was created in July, 2011 to lead Georgetown’s development of innovation alliances and partnerships with industry, universities, and national laboratories domestically and overseas.

We understand the importance of a multidisciplinary, integrative, and open-innovation approach to research. Our office strives to create an environment that recruits, engages, and rewards collaborative research among investigators from the natural sciences, social sciences, computational sciences, and the humanities. Our partners include investigators from other universities, public health, national laboratories, industry, and research organizations around the world.

ore about our office and our current research projects.

News and Events

OSVPR awarded 5-year grant from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for Deduplication of Cases in the National HIV Surveillance System

August 1, 2024

Georgetown’s Office of the Senior Vice President for Research was awarded a 5-year competitive grant to continue work with 59 public health jurisdictions to securely share data using the ATra ® software, developed by J Smart, Research Scientist in OSVPR.  During the previous grant period (2018-2024), OSVPR enrolled 40 jurisdictions in the project and conducted quarterly runs with over 1.4M records loaded and deduplicated across the jurisdictions.  Under the new grant, OSVPR will continue to enroll jurisdictions and conduct quarterly matching, and also develop a proof of concept for a server-to-server model of sharing data to address legal barriers in some jurisdictions.  For more information on this work, visit the project page here or contact Atra@georgetown.edu.

OSVPR presents poster at National Ryan White conference

August 22, 2024

Anne Rhodes, director of the Health Analytics program, presented a poster at the National Ryan White Conference in Washington, DC on August 22, 2024.  This poster, “Deduplicating Persons across the DC Eligible Metropolitan Area: Using the ATra® Black Box” reported on a project OSVPR did with the Maryland, DC, Virginia, and West Virginia Departments of Health that used the ATra Black Box to deduplicate persons across the Ryan White Eligible Metropolitan Area (EMA) which encompasses DC, parts of southern MD and northern Virginia, and 2 counties in West Virginia.  This analysis found that 31.4% of persons in the EMA had surveillance records in multiple public health jurisdictions.  The ATra Black Box was able to deduplicate persons in the EMA and report on care continuum measures, including linkage to care and viral suppression, which are key indicators for Ending the HIV Epidemic.  The poster can be found here .


    Improvements in HIV Data Quality across Public Health Jurisdictions Using the ATra™ Black Box

    January 21, 2022

    A paper published in Public Health Reports today details how Georgetown University partnered with 5 public health jurisdictions to enhance the matching of persons across HIV surveillance databases.  The addition of alias names to the algorithm that matched persons across jurisdictions identified 9070 (4.5%) more duplicate matches than using only one name per person.  It also increased the total number of matches at the exact through high levels by 15.4%.  This use of all possible names for a person provides more actual and potential matches to a jurisdiction, increasing the data available for ensuring engagement in HIV care and measuring progress on the HIV Care Continuum.

    Data-Sharing Technology Enhancing HIV Public Health Action Across Region

    January 15, 2016

    An interdisciplinary study published today in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance outlines how the D.C., Maryland and Virginia health departments, Georgetown and George Washington universities developed a novel privacy-enhanced data-sharing technology to improve HIV surveillance data across the region. Using this innovative approach, the three health departments were able to confirm that more than 21,000 people living with HIV appeared in the Enhanced HIV/AIDS Reporting System (eHARS) databases of at least two jurisdictions in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area between 1981 and 2015. Indicating such movement for HIV care across borders in the region is important because people might be deemed to be out of such care when they are in fact receiving medical attention in another jurisdiction.

    New Research on HIV Transmission & Combination Antiretroviral Therapy

    January 13, 2016

    Dr. Jeffrey Collmann and Joanne Michelle Ocampo published research entitled “Trajectory analyses of virologic outcomes reflecting community-based HIV treatment in Washington DC 1994–2012” in BMC Public Health.

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