Victoria A. Harden retired in 2006 after twenty years as the founding director of the Office of NIH History at the National Institutes of Health. She has written numerous articles about AIDS and has lectured widely on its history. Dr. Harden is he author of Inventing the NIH: Federal Biomedical Research Policy, 1887–1937(1986) and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever: History of a Twentieth-Century Disease (1990), the latter winning the Henry Adams Prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government. She received the American Historical Association’s 2006 Herbert Feis Award for outstanding contributions to public history. In 2007 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association for the History of Medicine. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.