The Collaborative HIV Prevention Research in Minority Communities Program
Meet the program faculty
Tor Neilands and Diane Binson, Co-Directors
Torsten B. Neilands, PhD [Quantitative Methods, Social Psychology]
Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine
Co-Director
Dr. Neilands has served as a data analyst and statistical consultant at CAPS since January of 2000 and has directed the Center's Methods Core since 2003. Dr. Neilands obtained a bachelor's degree in English Literature and Psychology at University of California at Santa Cruz in 1988. He received a master's degree equivalent in Quantitative Methods and Psychometrics from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the same institution, conferred in 1993. His post-graduate work consisted of eight years of full-time statistical consulting for researchers in a wide variety of academic disciplines in his role as a statistical consultant at the University of Texas at Austin academic computing center. During this time Dr. Neilands also consulted with and performed statistical analyses for a wide variety of faculty and graduate student researchers on a contract basis and received funding from the Norwegian Research Council as a co-principal investigator for a three year study.
Dr. Neilands is especially conversant with multivariate statistical models with a special interest in structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis of survey scale and behavioral sciences data. He also has considerable experience with longitudinal data analysis methods such as growth curve analysis and multilevel (hierarchical linear) modeling. He maintains an active interest in advanced, likelihood-based methods for handling missing data in applied research settings, methods for handling non-normal outcome data in structural equation and mixed effects models, and influential case diagnostic methods in regression analysis. Dr. Neilands presently serves as a co-investigator on multiple behavioral research projects at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at UCSF. His substantive interests include STD awareness, education, and prevention; HIV medication adherence issues, and stress and coping theory.
Dr. Neilands is the program’s Co-Director and one of the faculty mentors. He serves as a quantitative and methodological resource to participants in the program by reviewing data analysis sections of participants' grant proposals and working with program participants and their home institution statisticians to craft grant proposal data analysis sections. He also assists program participants with sample size calculations and he provides guidance in survey instrument development, hypothesis generation, and study design issues.
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Diane Binson, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Medicine
Co-Director
Dr. Binson is a sociologist who brings considerable experience in teaching and research methods to this project, particularly survey research design, sampling, and questionnaire construction. While most of Dr. Binson’s career has been in research, she also has taught sociology at Wayne State University in Detroit and Loyola University Chicago. Also, for six years as survey director at the Survey Research Laboratory, University of Illinois Chicago, Dr. Binson collaborated with numerous faculty, community organizations, and graduate students in preparing grant proposals and providing consultation in implementing their research. Dr. Binson has been at CAPS since 1991 and during that time has mentored students in various capacities: as research consultant on dissertations, as an outside member of dissertation committees (Loyola U), and as mentor of post-doctoral fellows in writing NIH grant proposals. Dr. Binson has been involved in AIDS-related research for over 20 years, has received numerous grants, mainly NIH and State of California funded, has experience studying multiple populations at risk for HIV using both quantitative and qualitative methods, and has published widely. She has a long history of collaboration with community partners, assisting community-based organizations in designing surveys to assess HIV-related risk in their communities, and she has designed evaluations of a number of community-led interventions. Early in the epidemic, Dr. Binson's research effort focused on understanding the trajectory of the epidemic, its prevalence in the U.S. and the determinants of HIV-related behavioral risk using large scale national and probability sample surveys; she also was a member of the core group of scientists (Drs. Catania, Stall and Paul) who designed and conducted a large random-digit-dialing telephone study of gay men in four major epicenters in the U.S. Dr. Binson's methodological studies have focused on issues related to measurement error and participation bias in sample surveys and on the use of cognitive interviewing techniques (i.e., "think alouds" and concurrent and retrospective verbal reports) to evaluate the feasibility of item and survey design in a study of injection drug users. She also has examined respondents' understanding of sexual behavior terms used in surveys and has studied the effects of question wording and interviewer gender on responses to sexual behavior questions among the general population. She has conducted a second methodological study focusing on a national probability sample of African-American men and women.
During the last ten years Dr. Binson's research interest has been on examining how the environment (physical, social, normative factors) in risk settings condition individual HIV-related risk behavior. Several NIMH grants provided funding to examine the process by which HIV/AIDS-prevention policy and programs are incorporated into risk settings and sex-club environments and to develop and validate a measure for HIV/AIDS-prevention environments. Such a measure facilitates an evaluation of person-environment interaction and the efficacy of structural- and individual-level interventions. Dr. Binson is currently completing data collection on a multi-method study to assess how participants script their sexual encounters in various sex venues and to explore how these sex venue environments differentially influence sexual risk. In collaboration research with community partners, Dr. Binson has conducted a number of evaluation studies to assess the efficacy of community programs to reduce HIV-related risk among men who have sex with men, a counseling and testing program in an African American community, and an intervention to reduce HIV/STD-risk among young men being released from prison. She has just completed an evaluation study of a program specifically designed to reduce sexual and drug-related risk among non-gay identified Latino men who have sex with men. Dr. Binson is a member of the George Washington University School of Medicine YES Center, which coordinates a demonstration project in eight metropolitan areas in the U.S. to identify HIV-positive young African-American and Latino men who have sex with men (ages 13 to 24), recruit them into care and evaluate the efficacy of continuance of care interventions.
Dr. Binson is the program’s Co-Director and one of the faculty
mentors. Click here for more information
on Dr. Binson.
Judith C. Barker, PhD [Medical Anthropology]
Professor in the Department of Anthropology, History & Social Medicine
Dr. Barker is a socio-cultural anthropologist. She is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, History & Social Medicine, and Associate Director of the Center to Address Disparities in Children’s Oral Health, at the University of California-San Francisco. Her 20 year research career, primarily qualitative in approach, has examined the experience and meaning of health and illness, its day-to-day management by those who are ill or frail, and the social organization of access to and delivery of informal health care. Understanding how lay people conceptualize risks to health or well-being and act (or not) to prevent risks from materializing, has been an interest threaded throughout many of her projects examining frail elderly, gender and ethnic differences in health beliefs, access to health care, substance use, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, family, and oral health. Barker is widely published in the gerontological, medical and anthropological literatures. She teaches graduate students, health professional students, clinical scholars and residents, post-doctoral fellows, and regularly engages in faculty level training, in geriatrics and in qualitative research methods.
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Cherrie Boyer, PhD [Psychology]
Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Adolescent Medicine
Cherrie B. Boyer, PhD is Professor of Pediatrics and Director of Interdisciplinary Training in the Division of Adolescent Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is an internationally recognized health psychologist with over 20 years of research experience in the area of adolescent and young adult health. Dr. Boyer has been the recipient of many grant awards and has been a productive investigator, publishing widely in the area of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention. Dr. Boyer’s program of research focuses on biopsychosocial antecedents of sexual risk behaviors and the role that these factors play in STIs, and their sequelae. She also has extensive research experience in the development and evaluation of cognitive-behavioral interventions to prevent and reduce the risk of STIs/HIV in adolescents and young adults in a variety of settings, including schools, teen and STD clinics, and community-based organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as nationally and internationally with military personnel.
Dr. Boyer is currently principal investigator of a large multi-site randomized controlled cognitive-behavioral intervention trial to prevent and reduce risk for STIs, unintended pregnancies, alcohol and other substance misuse, and exposure to or involvement with sexual violence among military recruits and enlisted personnel. This research also seeks to establish the best training practices (e.g., in co-ed vs. gender-separate settings) for educating young troops about these sensitive health issues. She is also currently involved in developing and evaluating an intervention for preventing HIV and other STIs among military personnel in Angola, Africa. Dr. Boyer is also involved in research as a member of the Adolescent Medicine and Community Prevention Leadership Groups of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s (NICHD) Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions (ATN), which addresses a broad adolescent- and young adult-focused intervention agenda.
In addition to her ongoing research program, Dr. Boyer is an international consultant to the Department of Defense HIV/AIDS Program. Her activities have included leading workshops and giving lectures on state-of-the science STI/HIV prevention strategies in a number of African countries. She has also conducted formative research and directed the production of educational videos in Ethiopia, Africa. Dr. Boyer is also a standing member of National Institutes of Health, Center for Scientific Review, Social Science and Population Studies study section and a member of UCSF’s Committee on Human Research.
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Héctor Carrillo, DrPH [Public Health, Social Sciences]
Assistant Professor, Human Sexuality Studies, San Francisco State University
Dr. Carrillo is Assistant Professor in Human Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University. He received his doctoral degree in public health (DrPH) from the University of California, Berkeley and did a postdoctoral fellowship in Behavioral Sciences at UCSF.
Dr. Carrillo has been program faculty since September 2002, having previously been a participant in the program from 1999 to 2001. He is primarily interested in the ethnographic study of sexuality and HIV prevention in Mexico and with Latino populations in the U.S. His current research analyzes how the sexuality of Mexican gay immigrants influences their paths of migration to the U.S., their incorporation into U.S. life, and their sexual health and HIV risk. He has also conducted a pilot study about the effects of acculturation on HIV risk among heterosexual Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. Dr. Carrillo was previously co-investigator in a study of drug use and unprotected sex among Latino gay men, and conducted an ethnographic study of sexuality and HIV prevention in Guadalajara, Mexico. The results of this latter study were published in book format (The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2002), which won the 2002 Ruth Benedict Prize from the American Anthropological Association.
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Olga Grinstead, Ph.D., MPH [Clinical Psychology, Public Health - Epidemiology]
Professor, Department of Medicine
Dr. Grinstead has been a researcher at CAPS since 1990, first as a fellow in the Traineeship in AIDS Prevention Studies program and now as a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Medicine. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from UCLA in 1981, completed her internship at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, and has been a licensed psychologist in California since 1983. After working as a clinician in community mental health, student heath, and for Kaiser Permanente, she left her career as a clinician to enter the TAPS fellowship in 1990. She received her MPH is Epidemiology from the University of California Berkeley in 1991 and also earned a certificate in Alcohol and Drug Abuse Studies from UC Berkeley Extension in 1993.
Dr. Grinstead was one of the original faculty mentors for this program, returning to the program in 2004 after an absence of several years. She also directed the program in 2006. Her primary research interest is in the development and evaluation of HIV and STI prevention programs in communities of color. Her program of research has focused on interventions targeting incarcerated persons and their families. Initially trained in quantitative methods, she has also conducted several qualitative interview studies and published both quantitative and qualitative research findings. Dr. Grinstead also led CAPS' Technology and Information Exchange (TIE) Core which is responsible for providing technical assistance to researchers and service providers regarding the application of HIV prevention science to the development of effective programs. The TIE Core is also focused on the development of creative methods for dissemination CAPS' science and the development and support of community-academic research partnerships.
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Jeanne Tschann, PhD [Social Psychology]
Professor, Department of Psychiatry
Dr. Tschann is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at University of California, Santa Cruz, and has been a researcher at UCSF since 1984.
She has been program faculty and a collaborator since the beginning of the program. Her research focuses on personal relationships and their influence on the health-related functioning of adolescents, particularly in Latino populations. She has conducted two longitudinal studies funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (a HRSA program), on how family relationships influence adolescents’ health risk behaviors (Tschann, Flores, Pasch, & Marín, 1999; Tschann, Flores, Marín, et al, 2002), and adolescents’ violence and victimization (Ozer, Tschann, et al, 2004; Tschann, et al., 2002). In the project focusing on adolescents’ violence and victimization, she examined peer-directed violence such as fighting and weapons carrying, sexual coercion and dating violence. Dr. Tschann has received funding by NIAID to examine the impact of sexual relationship dynamics on condom use among Latino adolescent couples. In this research, she is using both quantitative and qualitative methods to assess sexual relationship issues, such as each partner’s relative power in the couple relationship, which condom negotiation strategies are effective, and the cultural context such as traditional gender role beliefs and comfort with sexual communication (Tschann, Adler, et al, 2002). She has collaborated on these studies with Drs Barbara Marín and Elena Flores. In all her research, Dr. Tschann engages in extensive qualitative work, including focus groups and qualitative interviews, to develop measures and to assure the cultural appropriateness of measures. Dr. Tschann brings a great deal of expertise in research methodology, statistics, and instrument development to the Collaborative Program. She has acted as methodological consultant to numerous studies, and advises program participants on their research designs and methodology.
Click here for more information on Dr. Tschann's publications cited above.