Army medical service
DR Redfield's medical residency was undertaken at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) in Washington, D.C., where he completed his postgraduate medical training and internships in internal medicine (1978-1980), as a U.S. Army officer. Redfield completed clinical and research fellowships at WRAMC, in infectious diseases and tropical medicine, by 1982.
Redfield continued as a U.S. Army physician and medical researcher at the WRAMC for the next decade, working in virology, immunology and clinical research. He collaborated with teams at the forefront of AIDS research, publishing several papers and advocating for strategies to translate knowledge gained from clinical studies to the practical treatment of patients afflicted by chronic viral diseases.
Redfield retired from the Army in 1996 as a colonel.
Academic positions
In 1996, Redfield, his HIV research colleague Robert Gallo and viral epidemiologist William Blattner co-founded the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. It is a multidisciplinary research organization dedicated to developing research and treatment programs for chronic human viral infection and disease.
At the University of Maryland, Baltimore, Redfield served as a tenured professor of medicine and microbiology. Redfield is known for his contributions in this period — in clinical research, in particular, for research into the virology and therapeutic treatments of HIV infection and AIDS. In the early years of investigations into the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, Redfield led research that demonstrated that the HIV retrovirus could be heterosexually transmitted. He also developed the staging system now in use worldwide for the clinical assessment of HIV infection.