Matifadza Hlatshwayo Davis

Matifadza Hlatshwayo Davis, MD, MPH, is the Director of Health for the City of St. Louis. Dr. Hlatshwayo Davis received her medical degree from Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and a Master’s in Public Health Degree from Case Western Reserve University. She completed her internal medicine residency at University Hospitals Case Medical Center. She went on to complete her Infectious Diseases fellowship at the Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM), also completing a one year dedicated non-ACGME HIV fellowship and a two-year dedicated Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) fellowship.

She was a Clinical Instructor at Washington University School Medicine for two years and an Associate Program Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases fellowship program. She was also in the leadership of the Office of Inclusion and Diversity at the WUSM where she wrote a policy dedicated to addressing patient bias against faculty, trainees and staff with an accompanying toolkit and curriculum for the residency program. 

Dr. Hlatshwayo Davis was an Infectious Diseases physician at the John Cochran VA Medical Center where she was the Lead HIV Clinician, Graduate Medical Education Coordinator and Outpatient Parenteral Antibiotic Therapy supervisor. Her passion for community engagement, diversity and inclusion and patients living with HIV (PLWH), culminated in her becoming the co-chair for the Fast Track Cities initiative in St. Louis, which in collaboration with the City and County health departments as well as major HIV community organizations in St. Louis, is dedicated to end the HIV epidemic by 2030. She was later appointed to the City of St. Louis Board of Health where she helped lead the city and region in upholding the highest possible medical and public health standards.

Dr. Hlatshwayo Davis is now a national and international medical contributor on COVID-19 with a particular focus on marginalized populations, and has been featured in outlets such as CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, MSNBC, and Newsweek, among others. She is also an Associate Editor for Disparities and Competent Care for the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA).

Dr. Hlatshwayo Davis’s career passions include community engagement, the care of people living with HIV and the impact of COVID-19 infection in marginalized populations. She was the co-PI (principal investigator) for a study comparing the impacts of COVID-19 on HIV between St. Louis, Missouri and Sao, Paulo, Brazil. She was also the clinical co-lead for a regional COVID-19 Population Prevalence grant where she brought her expertise in Infectious Diseases and roots in the community to write protocols for the management of COVID-19 positive individuals, design a program to provide wrap-around services to those in need and manage a workforce around this clinical response effort.

Dr. Hlatshwayo was active in medical education where, in addition to being the Graduate Medical Education supervisor at the John Cochran VA Medical Center and Associate Program Director for the Washington University Infectious Diseases Fellowship program, she also served on the IDSA Medical Education Community of Practice Mentorship Work Group and the Grants for Emerging Researchers/Clinicians Mentorship committees. Additionally, she was on the Board of Directors for the IDSA Minority Interest Group. She mentored four trainees and has given over twenty lectures as well as invited talks including Medicine Grand Rounds at John Hopkins University.