Zvavahera (Mike) Chirenje, MD, FRCOG

Professor, Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences
Professor, College of Health Sciences, University of Zimbabwe
 

Dr. Chirenje is an attending Gynecological Oncologist at Parirenyatwa Hospital in Harare, Zimbabwe. He also conducts HIV prevention clinical trials for women with a particular emphasis on microbicide and pre-exposure prophlyaxis (PrEP) development.

In 1994, Dr. Chirenje was one of the founding members of the University of Zimbabwe - University of California, San Francisco (UZ-UCSF) Collaborative Research Programme in Women’s Health, and has served as the Executive Director since 2002. He provides fiscal, operational, and scientific oversight of a complex research unit that employs about 300 staff and research investigators. He serves as Principal Investigator for a large National Institutes of Health-sponsored UZ-UCSF Clinical Trials Unit (CTU), providing leadership that promotes high quality research for the four affiliated Division of AIDS-funded HIV/AIDS networks of ACTG, HPTN, IMPAACT, and MTN. His site was awarded HIV vaccine research status in 2014 (HVTN).

Dr. Chirenje was Principal Investigator for a large protocol that screened 11,000 women in Harare, which became an international milestone study demonstrating the effectiveness of visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) in screening for cervical cancer in low resource settings. He is chairman of the cervical cancer control program in Zimbabwe. For the last 25 years, Dr. Chirenje has been Director for the UZ - UCSF Dysplasia Clinic at Spilhaus Clinical Research Site in Harare, where he has introduced digital colposcopy, loop excision treatment and cyrotherapy training syllabus for VIA workshops. He is chair of the Mentored Research Scholarship Program at the University of Zimbabwe.

 

Areas of interest:

  • Cervical Cancer screening and treatment of pre-cancer lesions in low resource settings
  • Natural history of human papillomavirus (HPV) in HIV-infected and uninfected women
  • Association of HIV with cervical and vulval cancer
  • Microbicides development for HIV prevention in women
  • Antiretroviral-based clinical trials for PrEP HIV prevention in women

 

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