An instructor in the 2012 course, Colonel Colin Ohrt, MD, is currently the founding director, Consortium for Health Action. He has 20 years of experience in malariology, drug discovery and development, and applied research. After seeing how many people were killed by malaria, he chose to join the US Army and worked alongside a retired infectious diseases Army physician who led the only funded malaria research program at the US Army/Navy. Colonel Ohrt went directly to Thailand to do drug treatment trials with multi-drug resistant malaria on the Thai-Cambodian border. He studied new antimalarials for 2.5 years and then spent a year in rural Indonesia executing malaria prophylaxis studies with Indonesian transmigrants and soldiers.

In 1995, Colonel Ohrt returned to Washington, DC where he completed a clinical pharmacology fellowship and a master’s degree in Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. He later led several drug development projects, including intravenous artelinate/artesunate, new drugs related to azithromycin, and tafenoquine. He also established a Malaria Diagnostics Center for Excellence in Kisumu, Kenya and spent extensive time in the field in Kenya, Thailand, Cambodia, and Tanzania. He supported malaria diagnostics quality improvement in Tanzania at the request of the President of Tanzania.

Selected Links

Consortium for Health Action