Aileen Chang is an Associate Professor of Medicine with her research focused on arboviruses such as chikungunya, dengue, and Zika viruses that are all spread by the Aedes mosquito. She received her MD from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She completed her Internal Medicine Residency, General Medicine Fellowship and Masters in Science and Public Health at the University of Miami. She is also holds a Certificate of Knowledge in Clinical Tropical Medicine and Travelers' Health and Advanced Rheumatology from the American College of Rheumatology. She is boarded in Internal Medicine and cares for a panel of primary care patients. She is part of the faculty of the Department of Medicine and Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Tropical Medicine at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, D.C.
As Chief Operating Officer for the Dengue Relief Foundation, Dr. Chang has spent the last decade focused on dengue fever clinical management, laboratory diagnostics and public health management internationally and domestically. In response to the 2009 Florida Keys dengue outbreak, she became part of a task force brought together by the Center for Disease Control and the Florida Department of Health to train physicians in the management of dengue. She is currently running a clinical trial to identify the role of zanamivir to treat dengue vascular permeability syndrome and assess non-structural protein-1 related effects of dengue.
When chikungunya erupted for the first time in the western hemisphere in the Caribbean in 2013, she trained Florida physicians to recognize and manage chikungunya infection, studying knowledge and attitudes towards this disease, and managing training pertaining to the local outbreaks in Florida. As Principal Investigator on the Rheumatology Research Foundation funded grant to study Chikungunya in the Americas, she characterized the frequency of chikungunya arthritis in the largest Latin American cohort to date and developed a hypothesis for the pathophysiology of persistent symptoms and put together a strong interdisciplinary scientific and logistical team to perform research in Colombia and the United States.
During this time, she began to work in translational science, returning to the laboratory to perform biomarker analysis. This work was published in Arthritis and Rheumatology and reviewed by Nature Reviews Rheumatology. Since then, she has been working in in-vitro and in-vivo models under a career development award from the National Institute for Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases to study interleukin-2 therapy for chikungunya arthritis in a Colombian cohort and mouse model. She is currently setting up a clinical trial to assess the utility of methotrexate for the treatment of chikungunya arthritis.
In addition, with the Zika outbreak, she worked with an interdisciplinary team of scientists to evaluate Zika-induced Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) in Colombia funded by a career development award. We have found the potential importance of antibodies in Zika-GBS pathogenesis.