About Me

I am Associate Professor in the School of International Service where I am Chair of the International Development Program at American University (AU).  I am affiliate faculty in AU's Center on Health, Risk and Society.  I am Associate Director of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Core of the District of Columbia’s Center for AIDS Research, through which I lead two scientific interest groups on Latina/o/x HIV.  I am a member of the NIH Fogarty International Center's Adolescent HIV Prevention and Treatment Implementation Science Alliance, which focuses on HIV prevention and care among adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa.

I earned a Ph.D. in Health Behavior in 2009 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health.  Prior to my faculty position, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University’s Global Health Institute.  My career commitment is to understand how social and structural determinants are linked to health disparities both globally and locally, to design community-based interventions to reduce these disparities, and to train students in theoretically-informed research and practice.  ​

 

The photo below is from my experience conducting research during the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone.  For more on that, please read our paper (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0005077) or blog (http://slinvisiblewar.blogspot.com/).

​