Dr. Fatima Kakkar is an infectious diseases pediatrician at the research center of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Sainte-Justine as well as an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the Université de Montréal. She is also a pediatric infectious diseases consultant at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Sainte-Justine, as well as a clinical investigator at the Centre Maternel et Infantil sur le SIDA, CHU Sainte-Justine. She is the chair of the Canadian Pediatric and Perinatal HIV/AIDS Research Group, the co-chair of the pediatric and adolescent transition working group, and part of the steering committee for the Canadian Pediatric HIV Surveillance Network and the Quebec HIV Guidelines Committee.
She earned her undergraduate degree in the Faculty of Arts in political science, and received her medical degree at McGill University. She then followed with a residency in paediatrics at Western University and a fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Toronto. Dr. Kakkar has also received a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene from Lima, and more recently, she has completed a master’s degree in public health and quantitative methods at Harvard University.
Dr. Kakkar’s research interests include pediatric HIV, mother-child infections, and epidemiology. Her main axis is viral and immune disorders and cancers, and her research theme focuses on infection and immunity.
She is a co-investigator for CTN 281: EPIC 4 Study, which is aiming to determine whether the early use of combination anti-retroviral therapy in vertically transmitted cases (when HIV is passed from mother to child) results in a state of HIV suppression that can be controlled without further drug use.
