Megan Huchko, MD, MPH recently joined Duke, with a dual appointment as an Associate Professor in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology and the Duke Global Health Institute. Megan was an undergraduate at Duke, before moving to New York City to complete her medical school (Albert Einstein) and residency training (Columbia). She is moving here from the University of California, San Francisco, where she completed her fellowship in Reproductive Infectious Disease and joined the faculty in 2009.
She practices as an ob/gyn generalist and specializes in cervical cancer prevention through her clinical work and global women’s health research. Her research focuses on optimizing the diagnosis and treatment of cervical cancer among vulnerable women in settings where health disparities occur. She has been working with the Family AIDS Care and Education Services (FACES) program in the Nyanza Province of western Kenya since 2006.
She designed and implemented a cervical cancer screening and prevention (CCSP) program for HIV-infected women enrolled in care at FACES. The CCSP program has provided a clinical resource, as well as a cohort to evaluate the epidemiology of cervical cancer among HIV-infected women, the feasibility of integrating cervical cancer prevention programs into HIV and general outpatient clinics, the safety of various diagnostic and treatment modalities, the efficacy of low-cost/low-resource screening modalities in HIV-infected women and provider and patient-level barriers and facilitators to uptake of cervical cancer prevention activities.
Currently, she is carrying out several large studies in central Uganda and western Kenya to evaluate the optimal implementation strategy for HPV-based cervical cancer screening in rural settings. At Duke, she will be leading a Center of Excellence in Global Women’s Health through the Global Health Institute.