Infectious disease expert Jeanne Marrazzo assumes Fauci role at NIH

WASHINGTON — University of Alabama at Birmingham infectious disease director Jeanne Marrazzo will be the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ director by this fall.

The announcement comes roughly eight months after longtime institute director Anthony Fauci stepped down. Marrazzo will assume her post at the $6.3 billion-dollar agency just as Congress begins hashing out the 2024 budget. Some Republicans have pushed for controls on NIAID-funded pathogen research to be included in that legislation.

Marrazzo is “very well-liked, very respected” and experienced, Fauci told STAT. “She’s going to be a good fit. It’s a great challenge that she’s going to be facing; it’s going to be exciting for her.”

Like Fauci, Marrazzo hails from an HIV research background. Her work focuses largely on sexually transmitted diseases in female reproductive systems. She has worked with the NIH through grants and advisory boards steadily for more than two decades, the institute said in a press release.

Marrazzo “brings a wealth of leadership experience from leading international clinical trials and translational research, managing a complex organizational budget that includes research funding and mentoring trainees in all stages of professional development,” acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak said in a statement.

President Biden’s nominee to replace Tabak as permanent director, current cancer chief Monica Bertagnolli, has stalled in the Senate as health committee chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) demands more aggressive White House action on drug pricing. However the NIAID director, like the institute’s other 26 campuses, does not require Senate confirmation.

“An institute director’s job is very different than the NIH director’s job,” Fauci said. “The job of the NIAID director is not a political appointee. There’s been a lot of pushing on certain sectors to make it politically influenced, and I think that’s a bad idea.”

Marrazzo can still expect to be called in front of congressional panels, as committees on both sides of the Hill interrogate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and NIAID-funded research including a controversial field of pathogen study known as gain-of-function research. Republicans have also called for Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins, a current White House adviser, to testify on these topics.

Marrazzo regularly spoke about public health measures during the pandemic, often taking a pragmatic approach. In October 2020 she acknowledged that more people would move indoors as the weather changed, straying from social distancing guidelines.

STI researchers were quick to applaud the NIH’s choice. Marrazzo, whose Twitter background shows her in a camper van, regularly shares infectious disease information between retweets of happy goat videos and WeRateDogs tweets.

Her most recent work includes research on PrEP use among cisgender women, such as a study that found it highly effective for women who take the pills every day and mostly effective for women who took it at least four times a week — but that some women in the study overreported their adherence.

“We obviously need other options for women who want to initiate PrEP — they’re really urgently needed,” she said about the research in February.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified Marrazzo’s university affiliation. It is the University of Alabama at Birmingham.