Barbara Schechtman
Executive Director, Midwest AETC 
University of Illinois at Chicago
College of Medicine, Department of Family Medicine

Nathan Linsk, the founder and Principal Investigator of the Midwest AETC since 1988, retired from his position on August 15th.  Most of the AETC network knows Nathan.  He served as the first President of the National Association of AIDS Education and Training Centers and has been a constant presence in the national program since its inception.  As such, he brought thoughtful and principled dialogue to the national conversations.

Nathan, who was a Professor in the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois, brought his established interest in HIV/AIDS with him to MATEC.  Prior to his role in the AETC network, he was instrumental in bringing the first HIV training to the University of Illinois Hospital in 1987, where he served as the Director of Social Work. Though trained in gerontological social work, his interest in HIV followed his personal interests in the health and well-being of the gay community.  This concern translated into a lifelong career in fostering the quality of clinical education to improve HIV care services for those in need.  For example, in 1989 one of his early and very significant projects was working with the newly-established AIDS Foundation of Chicago to launch the Northeastern Illinois Case Management Cooperative, the second HRSA HIV program in the Chicago area.  His work on development of structured training for the case managers in the network led to their understanding the importance of quality training for HIV care providers. This group continues to this day and is one of the nation’s foremost case management programs. 

Guided by his background in gerontology, in 1990, Nathan pursued the connection between aging and HIV care through an early training and advocacy program called ALCAP, the AIDS Long Term Care Access Project.  This program partnered with long-term care facilities - designed primarily for the elderly - to accept and appropriately care for young gay men whose HIV disease required intensive nursing care.

Nathan’s HIV training interest was not solely focused on domestic needs.  In 1992, in response to the extraordinary news that large numbers of children in orphanages in Romania were infected with HIV through contaminated needles, he and others built a strong training response working with Romanian doctors to establish universal precautions to avoid further infections. This was the first of many international HIV projects that Nathan undertook.

In 1995 he continued his interest in the convergence of gerontology and HIV by co-founding NAHOF, the National Association on HIV Over Fifty.  This group brought early attention to the fact that “older” adults were at risk for HIV infection. NAHOF now also focuses on the issues of people living with HIV who are aging.

When the exciting scientific advances of the mid-1990’s led to the use of drug “cocktails,” Nathan and several colleagues realized the extraordinary importance of adherence to successful use of these new drug combinations.  In 1997, the group established a national Adherence Initiative, which brought together HIV experts from around the country in three intensive multi-day meetings of specific workgroups that produced several new adherence tools and training programs that have been used across the country to teach providers about adherence issues.

Understanding the importance of a team of multi-disciplinary care providers to HIV treatment success, Nathan successfully pursued funding for the Great Lakes Addiction Technology Transfer Center and served as its PI until 2006.  His leadership has provided the impetus for MATEC and the Great Lakes ATTC to pursue several joint projects on HIV and Substance Use training for health care providers.

International program activities have continued to be part of Nathan’s work in HIV training.  Following a sabbatical year on a Fulbright scholarship spent in Ethiopia in 2006, he was awarded a PEPFAR Twinning Center grant to work on training development for the paraprofessional social work staff caring for Orphaned and Vulnerable Children (OVC) in Tanzania. This grant partnered MATEC and the Jane Addams College of Social Work with the Institute of Social Work in Dar-es-Salaam.  Shortly after the first year of this grant, a second Twinning Center grant, partnering MATEC/JACSW with both the Institute for Social Work and Addis Ababa University, was awarded.  This innovative project is focused on workforce development in the area of social work services for children affected by HIV in both countries.  Nathan will continue working with these projects in his “retirement.”

Nathan has continued to build the HIV training program through MATEC.  His particular interest has been in developing evaluation strategies to establish the quality and value of the AETCs’ work.  Over the years, Nathan has published six times on this topic.  As the Co-editor of the Journal of HIV/AIDS and Social Services, he devoted a special issue in 2005 to the topic of HIV health professional training and its outcomes, guest edited by Peter Messeri, the then-PI of the AETC National Evaluation Center.

Nathan built his expertise in HIV training from the perspective of a professional educator and social worker.  He brought an understanding of how training must focus first on the needs of the ultimate “client,” the person with or at risk for HIV infection.  He has served as one of the de-facto historians of the AETC network, reminding us of our mission and purpose.  We at MATEC will take his leadership and vision with us into our future.