Steffanie A. Strathdee (born May 28, 1966) is the Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences, Harold Simon Professor at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Co-Director at the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics. She has been awarded more than US$64 million in federal research grants as a principal investigator. She is known for her work on HIV research and prevention programmes in Tijuana. Strathdee was named one of the 50 Most Influential People in Health Care for 2018 by TIME magazine and in 2022, was listed in the top half of the 'best 1000 female scientists worldwide' by Research.com. Career Early career Strathdee is a Canadian-born infectious disease epidemiologist who has spent most of her career focusing on HIV prevention research in underserved, marginalized populations in developed and developing countries, including injection drug users, men having sex with men, and sex workers. Her early research in Vancouver, Canada identified a major outbreak of HIV infection that occurred among injection drug users that occurred despite the presence of one of the largest needle exchange programs in North America. She and her colleagues used this research to successfully advocate for additional HIV prevention and treatment services in Vancouver from the provincial and federal governments. In Vancouver, she founded the Vancouver Injection Drug Use study in 1996, and the Vanguard study of young men who have sex with men. Her work on these studies led her to identify social determinants as independent predictors of HIV risk taking. She received a Young Investigator's Award from the International AIDS Society in 1996 for this research. In 1998, she published a manuscript in JAMA which showed that only half of medically eligible HIV-infected drug users were receiving antiretroviral therapy in Vancouver, which subsequently led to intensified efforts to expand access to HIV care. She was recruited to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 1998, where she was an Associate Professor until 2003, before being recruited to the University of California San Diego in 2004. Leadership in global health Since 2008, Strathdee has been Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences with responsibility for oversight of UC San Diego's campus-wide Global Health Institute (GHI), which aims to facilitate research, education, private partnerships across diverse disciplines and to address global health challenges in the 21st century. Together with her husband, Thomas Patterson, she has led a large research and training program