 The institute is a collaborative venture including Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, with the initial goal of contributing to the development of an effective HIV vaccine.He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, an adjunct faculty member at Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine, and a founding scientist at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV (K-RITH).Walker was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2004.