Although the new University-wide AIDS Institute is still in its infancy, scholars here have already taken steps to organize a diverse array of Harvard resources into a cohesive research effort designed to study different aspects of AIDS-related issues.

Just this past week, the Institute's policy board, which is responsible for long-range planning and is headed by President Bok, appointed the program's first administrative executive director, and the four-month old organization also received a major grant to sponsor a conference series on the future of AIDS health care.

New Executive

The arrival of the new executive director, Alan Fein, should help accelerate communication and planning among different Harvard faculties, as well as efficiently coordinate AIDS research activities, according to Institute Director Dr. Myron E. Essex, a member of the policy board and chairman of the Department of Cancer Biology at the School of Public Health (SPH).

The executive director will make University AIDS research efforts more effective by organizing research newsletters, seminars and conferences at Harvard, officials said.

"[His hiring] will get our act together a little faster than it would have otherwise," says Essex. The executive director's duties will also include fundraising for various research projects and educational programs, he says. Money needed for research, new buildings and other facilities will total several million dollars, and officials expect the funds to come from government grants and private sources, according to Essex.

Fein, who has no background in the health sciences, comes to Harvard from the University of Chicago, where he served as director of that university's financial planning and budget departments for three years.

This new position is the third administrative post Fein, who has an M.B.A from Stanford, has held at Harvard. He served as publisher of Harvard Magazine and director of the Arnold Arboretum from 1980 to 1985.

"AIDS is the most important problem in our lifetime," Fein says. "The opportunity to get involved in the ground level of an organization that will be dealing with all aspects of the disease is just overwhelming."

Fein, who is due to arrive in October, was chosen from a field of more than 100 candidates from across the country, Essex says.

Big Bucks

Although Fein has not yet assumed his post, the Institute has already received a major grant to fund a series of AIDS conferences starting this winter and lasting 18 months.

The conference series, funded by a $450,000 Macy Foundation gift, is called, "Meeting the Need for Health Care Personnel: Managing the HIV Epidemic in the 1990s." The conference program is part of a long-term goal of the Institute to promote education about AIDS and to develop more effective health care policies for the disease.

"Seventy-thousand people have had AIDS," says Dr. Howard Hiatt, director of the Center for Policy and Education, one of five branches of the AIDS Institute. "Even now there aren't enough workers or enough hospital beds." Hiatt says that one of the concerns of the policy center will be figuring out how to construct feasible home care programs for AIDS patients.

"Traditionally, medical care hasn't paid for [home care treatment], so those services haven't been available. The question is how could and should those services be integrated into what people can expect, regardless of where they live," says Dr. Harvey J. Makadon, the Policy Center's associate director and program director for the newly funded conference series.