An instructor in the 2015 course, Richard Marlink is Henry Rutgers Professor of Global Health, professor in the Department of Medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and director Rutgers Global Health Institute at Rutgers University. Professor Marlink has worked to establish HIV/AIDS research, training, and clinical care programs in the US and abroad. He was instrumental in setting up the first HIV/AIDS clinic in Boston, and in the mid-1980s in Senegal, he was part of the team of Senegalese, French, and American researchers who discovered evidence for and then studied the disease outcomes of the second type of human AIDS virus, HIV-2.

Previously at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Marlink helped create two partnerships with the government of Botswana: the 1996 Botswana-Harvard Partnership with the Harvard AIDS Initiative, where he was executive director, and the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnerships, an African organization launched in 2000 with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates and Merck foundations. Also in 2000, Professor Marlink founded the Kitso AIDS Training Program, which would become Botswana’s national AIDS training program. Kitso means “knowledge” in the local Setswana language.