Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Spring 2014 | Page 41

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“All the unpleasant topics Today countless medical professionals
to be avoided at the dinner table— benefit from Renata’s research and
that’s my world of work,” says Renata expertise. She provides education
Dennis ’81, instruction and training and training for the “Big Six”—
coordinator for the Southeast AIDS physicians, physician’s assistants,
Training and Education Center, a advanced practice nurses, registered
federally funded program based at nurses, pharmacists, and dental
Emory University’s Department of professionals—and helps practitioners
Family and Preventative Medicine. set up point-of-care HIV-testing
Renata was “thrown into the deep programs, because identifying those
end” of AIDS research in 1999, and infected is crucial to slowing the
currently works on the front lines of epidemic.
public health among professionals
“Of the 1.2 million people in America
caring for HIV-positive patients.
infected with HIV, 19 percent don’t
“My work puts me at the intersection know it,” Renata says.

where grace
meets public health
Take a look at what’s new in AIDS
treatment and education in America
through the eyes of an expert.

of grace and the world of HIV/AIDS,”
she says. “And people talk to me—a
safe person.”

by Annette Heinrich LaPlaca ’ 86

EMORY PHOTO/VIDEO

Some find personal relief in sharing
their secrets—addictions, loved
ones with AIDS, or private fears. It is
the questions—and the people who
ask them—that continue to surprise
Renata.

Renata Dennis ’81 recently joined Wheaton’s Leadership Council, a
group formed in 2011, to help students consider God’s calling and make
career connections. She looks forward to helping students consider what
it means to enter the health professions with a missional mindset.

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SPRING

2014

“An elderly, silver-haired lady will strike
up a conversation, and I’ll find she
knows all the science of HIV and AIDS
treatment. Then I’ll talk to someone
young who doesn’t know that HIV
is not, for example, automatically
passed from a mother to her infant.”
(Perinatal medication for both mother
and newborn, along with avoiding
breastfeeding, reduce the chance
of a mother passing along HIV from
25 percent to only about 1 percent.)

Most people diagnosed as HIVpositive take preventive measures,
but undiagnosed individuals continue
to spread the virus. The good news,
Renata says, is that the 19 percent of
undiagnosed individuals is down from
25 percent in 2006, thanks in part to
recommendations from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention that all
people ages 13 to 65 be tested. For a
decade, quick-response testing has
made it possible for clinics to provide
same-day results, and now over-thecounter HIV tests are also available.

Involvement with the Minority AIDS
Initiative takes Renata outside her
usual medical circles to meet with
student health center staff, young
adults in colleges and universities (a
target audience for HIV prevention)
and also to Christian groups including
a local Catholic coalition and AfricanA biology major at Wheaton, Renata American churches, which tend to be
earned a nursing degree from Emory, “strong influencers in their communities.”
then took a break from healthcare to
Renata’s faith provides a sure
fulfill ministry assignments in Germany
foundation as she speaks to patients or
and Austria. Returning to the United
others marginalized by disease or their
States in the mid-90s, Renata earned a
circumstances.
master’s in public health and accepted
a position at Grady Hospital’s Infectious “I hold fast to my convictions, and I pray,”
Disease Clinic to work with pediatric she says. “I pray a lot—about how
HIV patients in a National Institute of to speak into a situation, and about
knowing when to listen.”
Health study.
W H EATON .EDU / A L U M N I

3/19/14 8:20 PM

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