{"id":6780,"date":"2016-01-08T22:32:13","date_gmt":"2016-01-08T22:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/kenyares\/?page_id=6780"},"modified":"2022-10-01T05:37:48","modified_gmt":"2022-10-01T05:37:48","slug":"sylvia-lacourse","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/kenyares\/about\/who-we-are\/uw\/sylvia-lacourse\/","title":{"rendered":"Sylvia LaCourse, MD, MPH"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Assistant Professor in the Department of\u00a0Medicine, Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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Sylvia LaCourse MD, MPH. is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Her current research focuses on improving TB prevention and screening in maternal child health settings. LaCourse realized her interest in global health initially as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal. Returning to the U.S. she completed post-bac pre-med courses and received her MD from the University of Louisville. During her residency in Internal Medicine\/Pediatrics at Brown University, she participated in numerous clinical rotations in Kenya, Burundi, Haiti and Malawi, and helped to organize a refugee primary care clinic. She returned to Malawi as a NIH Fogarty International Clinical Research Fellow, where her research focused on the performance of GeneXpert (rapid tuberculosis PCR-based diagnostic) in severely malnourished hospitalized children, and implementation research on counselor-initiated HIV testing of hospitalized adults and pediatric malnutrition screening using lay-screeners.Sylvia has recently completed her fellowship in Infectious Diseases and MPH in Epidemiology-International Health. Under the mentorship of Dr. Grace John-Stewart (Global Health, Epidemiology, Medicine, Pediatrics) and in collaboration with Dr. David Horne (Pulmonary-Critical Care), her research focuses on HIV\/TB in pregnancy including prevalence and correlates of active and latent TB and identifying optimal screening algorithms among HIV-infected pregnant women including the evaluation of Xpert and TB-LAM (rapid urine TB antigen test), as well as the incidence of interferon-gamma release assay (IGRA, Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection diagnostic) conversion among HIV-infected pregnant women in Kenya from a historical cohort. She is PI of a UW CFAR International Pilot Study evaluating the performance of M. tuberculosis infection diagnostics in pregnant and early postpartum HIV-infected women. During her MPH she conducted a retrospective study evaluating the risk of adverse infant outcomes associated with maternal TB in Washington State, and evaluation of the implementation of isoniazid preventive therapy in HIV-infected Kenyan female sex workers with Dr. Scott McClelland (Medicine, Global Health, Epidemiology). She has recently been awarded a UW CFAR New Investigator Award: Oral swab analysis (OSA) for TB diagnosis in women, adolescents, and HIV-infected individuals in collaboration with Grace John-Stewart and Gerard Cangelosi (Environmental and Occupational Health). She has also recently been awarded a NIH\/NIAID K23 Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award to study the impact of maternal HIV on Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection among peripartum women and their infants in western Kenya.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

Publications<\/h3>\n
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  1. Mullen, B, Githua, J, Escudero, JN, Mecha, J, Kijaro, L, Ndunge, M et al.<\/i>. Evaluation of non-sputum-based diagnostics for pediatric tuberculosis: the Pediatric TB Diagnostic (PDTBDx) cohort protocol. medRxiv. 2026; :. doi: 10.64898\/2026.04.01.26350011<\/a>. PubMed PMID:41959800<\/a> PubMed Central PMC13060392<\/a>.<\/li>
  2. Onyango, DO, Mecha, JO, Njagi, LN, Aoro, S, Malika, T, Kinuthia, J et al.<\/i>. Outcomes of the three-month weekly isoniazid with rifapentine (3HP) versus the six-month isoniazid preventive therapy (6H) among people newly enrolled in HIV care in western Kenya. medRxiv. 2026; :. doi: 10.64898\/2026.03.04.26347621<\/a>. PubMed PMID:41867187<\/a> PubMed Central PMC13001390<\/a>.<\/li>
  3. Kang, YJ, Wang, N, Malik, A, Lu, P, Njuguna, I, Maleche-Obimbo, E et al.<\/i>. An Fc receptor and IgA functional signature identifies TB disease in children living with HIV. medRxiv. 2026; :. doi: 10.64898\/2026.02.08.26345833<\/a>. PubMed PMID:41728310<\/a> PubMed Central PMC12919122<\/a>.<\/li>
  4. Githua, J, Mecha, J, Stern, J, Escudero, JN, Njagi, L, Kijaro, L et al.<\/i>. C-Reactive Protein for Pulmonary Tuberculosis Screening and Treatment Response Monitoring in Children. Open Forum Infect Dis. 2026;13 (2):ofaf816. doi: 10.1093\/ofid\/ofaf816<\/a>. PubMed PMID:41660661<\/a> PubMed Central PMC12872367<\/a>.<\/li>
  5. LaCourse, SM, Escudero, JN, Whatney, WE, Krish, KN, Subuddhi, A, Belauret, S et al.<\/i>. Mycobacterium tuberculosis-Specific CFP-10\/ESAT-6 CD4 and CD8 T-Cell Non-IFN-γ+ Responses Are Common in Young Kenyan Children Despite Low Reported Tuberculosis Exposure. J Infect Dis. 2026;233 (4):e981-e989. doi: 10.1093\/infdis\/jiag039<\/a>. PubMed PMID:41566843<\/a> PubMed Central PMC13033399<\/a>.<\/ol>Search PubMed<\/a>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

    Current Projects<\/h3>\n
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    Impact of maternal HIV on Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection among peripartum women and their infants<\/a><\/p>\n

    Preventing Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection in HIV-exposed infants<\/a><\/p>\n

    The effect of HIV exposure and infection on immunity to TB in children<\/a><\/p>\n

    NanoDisk-MS measured Mtb antigen peptides for TB diagnosis and treatment monitoring in HIV-infected children<\/a><\/p>\n

    Dynamics of tuberculosis immune response in peripartum HIV-infected and HIV-uninfected women<\/a><\/p>\n

    Kenya Tuberculosis Research & Training Program-UW (KTRTP UW)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Assistant Professor in the Department of\u00a0Medicine, Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Sylvia LaCourse MD, MPH. is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Her current research focuses on improving TB prevention and screening in maternal child health settings. LaCourse realized her interest in global health initially… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"parent":645,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page_no-sidebar-page.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-6780","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/kenyares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/kenyares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/kenyares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/kenyares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/kenyares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6780"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/kenyares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11347,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/kenyares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6780\/revisions\/11347"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/kenyares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/kenyares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}