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.
More about our office and our current research projects.
News and Events
Publication for 5-year project with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the use of the ATra Black Box for deduplication of data across public health jurisdictions
July 8, 2025
A paper published in Public Health Reports today details how Georgetown’s Office of the Senior Vice President for Research (OSVPR) successfully deduplicated HIV surveillance data across public health jurisdictions. Between 2018 and 2024, OSVPR enrolled 40 public health jurisdictions into the CDC Black Box project with signed data-sharing agreements, representing 75% of people living with diagnosed HIV in the United States. From November 2018 through May 2024, OSVPR conducted 21 quarterly matching sessions of the Black Box, processing >2.1 million records in the November 2023 session. This project decreased public health staff time needed to update information on people with HIV. This project has improved the quality of HIV surveillance data that are needed to measure progress on key HIV indicators at the local and national levels.
Link to paper = https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00333549251318985
Publication on use of the ATra Black Box for matching data for a large research cohort with public health data sources
May 7, 2025
A paper published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research outlines the work Georgetown’s Office of the Senior Vice President for Research (OSVPR) did with George Washington University and the Washington DC Department of Health (DC Health) to match data from the DC Cohort, a longitudinal HIV cohort study of people with HIV receiving care at 14 clinical sites in DC. OSVPR modified the Black Box to include providing deidentified data to George Washington University and developing analytic code to compare data between the DC Cohort and DC Health to report on data discrepancies. A total of 9744 records of DC Cohort participants were submitted for matching to DC Health. Of these, 9060 participants (93.0%) matched to surveillance data and were validated through manual review. The linkage resulted in the addition of 48,970 CD4 T-lymphocyte counts, 33,413 viral load lab records, and 767 previously unrecognized deaths. The implementation of the Black Box for sharing DC Cohort and DC Health data resulted in better capture of HIV lab records, improved vital status information, and enhanced characterization of care patterns for people with HIV enrolled in the DC Cohort.
Link to paper: https://www.jmir.org/2025/1/e77119
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 .
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.
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.