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I am a licensed clinical health psychologist, whose research has focused on understanding, measuring, and improving the health of patients with chronic diseases such as HIV. Over the past decade, I have developed a thriving program of multidisciplinary collaborative research focused on improving HIV treatment outcomes through patient empowerment. My research has been consistently funded, as evidenced by my PI status on seven NIH awards and one pending (three R01s, an R21, a K08, a K24, and an R03) and co-investigator on an additional 4 R01's. My mentoring and publication records echo this level of commitment and accomplishment. Such publications include observational and intervention studies that address psychosocial issues that are of importance to optimizing HIV treatment. My overall program of research centers on patient empowerment in HIV treatment. As such, I have collaborated on, developed, and led studies that address the intersection of psychological health and medical care and their entwined impact on health outcomes. My funded research includes observational studies and randomized controlled trials of interventions. My work is multidisciplinary, bringing together expertise in medicine, nursing, psychology, and anthropology.

My teaching mission is primarily achieved through my mentoring of early career investigators. My approach to mentoring embraces a mission to involve more behavioral science in multidisciplinary research. This includes the inclusion of rigorously trained behavioral scientists in the design, implementation and evaluation of clinical trials and the parallel training of clinical investigators from other disciplines in the behavioral issues central to clinical and biomedical research. For example, greater involvement of well-trained behavioral researchers in large scale trials evaluating biomedical interventions such as microbicides and vaccines are urgently needed. Such expertise in behavioral issues can measure and contextualize participants’ motivation to enroll and stay in trials and to adhere to trial protocols, thus addressing issues of internal validity in such trials. Further, behavioral scientists (or individuals from other disciplines trained in behavioral issues and methods) are needed to help identify and address societal, interpersonal, and individual barriers to the generalization and export of successful interventions, thereby adding external validity to existing research endeavors.