Last Updated 7.30.07 Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

These seven cores in the HU CFAR have been identified through our strategic planning process as those areas of science or administration that will best support the divergent needs of CFAR investigators and foster collaboration among AIDS investigators at Harvard. While each Core of the CFAR has discrete objectives, they do not work in isolation. In fact, a major challenge that we have successfully addressed through our existing CFAR infrastructure and administration is ensuring cross-core interactions and the facilitation, where appropriate, of multidisciplinary research.

Each of these cores builds on the lessons learned, successful operations, management, and efficiencies of the pre-existing cores in the DFCI and Partners/MGH CFARs. We have created economies of scale and eliminated redundancies in the operations and services of the pre-existing cores, where necessary. Some services have been eliminated, such as the provision of real-time PCR testing in the Immunology Core due to wide availability elsewhere. Other services have been expanded, such as the expansion of biostatistics support to clinical researchers. We believe that form should follow function and, therefore, the form of the interactions is guided by the functional and scientific purpose of cross-core or program activity.