June 8, 2024
The Center for Chronic Disease Research and Policy is excited to welcome Chris Kaperak to our Primary care Investigators Training in Chronic disease & Health disparities (PITCH) Fellowship!
Established in 2021 and funded by a five-year Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) T32 grant, the PITCH Fellowship trains the next generation of primary care clinical investigators to improve health outcomes and care delivery for patients with chronic diseases from underserved backgrounds.
The PITCH program trains fellows to conduct health services research, share their work with the public, write manuscripts and grants, and manage projects designed to transform the health care system to better serve vulnerable populations. In addition to dedicated mentorship with CDRP faculty affiliates, fellows have the opportunity to complete a Master of Science for Clinical Professionals.
Chris joins 2021 PITCH alumni Nicole Bohr Pierce and Nathaniel Joseph Glasser, 2022 PITCH fellows Ashley Elizabeth Brown, Jennifer H. Hwang, and Dedeepya Konuthula, and 2023 PITCH fellows John (Jack) Flores and Lauren Mitchell this July.
Chris Kaperak is currently a fellow in infectious diseases at University of Chicago Medicine. He attended medical school at the University of Virginia and completed his residency at the University of Chicago. His interests include long-acting HIV medications, primary care, and HIV.
My name is Chris Kaperak. I grew up in Seattle, Washington, attended medical school at the University of Virginia, and completed residency and my first year of infectious diseases fellowship here at the University of Chicago. During my time in medical school and residency, I became interested in infectious diseases from several different directions, including how people living with HIV perceive how their healthcare is delivered and how to improve HIV test result confirmation and how that can impact linkage to care. Delivering primary care to people allowed me to build longitudinal relationships with patients that I deeply value in my clinical practice. Therefore, I wanted to focus my infectious disease career on delivering HIV care and its intersection with other chronic diseases in the setting of people living much longer lives with their diagnosis. Additionally, with new long acting injectable HIV medications now available, I want to investigate how this new type of treatment affects how people receive and participate in both infectious disease and primary care.
I am excited for the PITCH fellowship because I have not yet had the structured opportunity to receive such extensive protected research time with course work targeted for the type of research I am interested in. I think this is an amazing opportunity to gain additional skills and begin projects that I hope to use and continue over the next many years to help me further our understanding of how the way we deliver HIV care can affect other aspects of people’s health.
Infectious Disease has been a passion of mine for a long time; in high school I was even voted “Most likely to cure the Common Cold.” While my career path has not quite brought me there, I still want to investigate how to improve the health of people living with infections.