AIDS researcher Coates to leave USCF

Tom Coates, an internationally renowned AIDS researcher, announced this week that he is resigning from his job as executive director of the University of California, San Francisco's AIDS Research Institute. Coates, 57, who led the institute since its founding in 1996, will be taking a post as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Medical School in September. "UCSF has been a wonderful place to work, and the AIDS program has evolved nicely," Coates told the San Francisco Chronicle. "It was time to turn that over to new leadership." As director of the institute, Coates, who is openly gay and HIV-positive, coordinated the efforts of more than 50 researchers at UCSF, the San Francisco Health Department, and the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. He also ran UCSF's Center for AIDS Prevention Studies. "He leaves a thriving clinical, research and outreach program," Haile Debas, dean of the UCSF School of Medicine, told the Chronicle. "Tom has done a spectacular job and will be sorely missed, both personally and professionally." Coates said he accepted the job at UCLA because his partner, Robert DuWors, also recently accepted a job at UCLA. DuWors will become deputy director of UCLA's Comprehensive Cancer Center. Coates will work as a professor in the UCLA Medical School's division of infectious diseases, where he will continue to focus on HIV research.