Community Advisory Board

Deb Borne

Deb Borne is a family physician with the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH). She serves as medical director at Tom Waddell Health Center and oversees HIV treatment and prevention efforts. She works closely with community-based organizations such as Tenderloin Health on HIV prevention and treatment, including needle exchange, and has strong ties to city-funded shelters and community behavioral health agencies. Deb obtained her master’s degree in social work at Columbia University and her medical training at Brown University and UCSF.

As both a social worker and a physician, she has worked with highly marginalized communities including homeless persons, drug users, psychiatric patients, and incarcerated and recently released individuals. Deb is very interested in how research can inform and assist with community-based clinical work. HIV prevention is one of her personal and professional passions.

Jesse Brooks

Jesse Brooks is a longtime activist in the Oakland area and currently writes a weekly column in the Post News Group, the largest African American paper in the Bay Area. Since 2009 he has written about HIV/AIDS, reaching over 40,000 readers each week. Jesse was diagnosed in 1993 and has seen both sides of HIV, as a client and as a care provider, starting his roots at New Village, which later became part of the Black Coalition on AIDS. He facilitates social and substance-abuse groups and has worked on multiple research study teams including UCSF’s Urban Health Study and Explore, an SFDPH/UCSF project.

He made a movie, “The Ceremony,” about his personal internal battles with addiction, stigma, and self identity, which showed at the 5th annual Black LGBT film festival in Oakland, and is featured on the Oakland’s Office of AIDS poster campaigns, “HIV Stops with Us” and “I choose to disclose.” Jesse speaks at churches, campuses, and conferences, and his goal is to reach youth by demonstrating that “you can free yourself, no matter what challenges you face.”

Kevin E. Bynes

Kevin E. Bynes is the director of health promotion programs at AIDS Project of the East Bay (APEB). He comes to APEB from Atlanta, Georgia, where since 1996 he worked in youth-serving and AIDS services organizations. In 1999, Kevin began his first non-profit management job when he implemented the Mpowerment intervention developed at CAPS for Youth Pride in Atlanta. Kevin has worked in research at Georgia State University’s Department of Psychology and at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. Kevin holds master of education and bachelor of science degrees from American Intercontinental University in Atlanta.

Kevin was raised lovingly by his single mother, Karen Bynes-Muhammad, in the San Francisco Bay Area and is proud to defy all of the predictions made by the Moynihan Report about families like his.

Lorenzo Hinojosa

Lorenzo Hinojosa has been with the CAPS CAB since September 2007. He has decades of experience in public health fieldwork, starting in 1980 as a state disease intervention specialist in Orange County, then moving on to work in Los Angeles and then Oakland. He has managed a Bay Area–wide mobile clinic project and was one of the first California Disclosure Program (PCRS) coordinators assigned to the Bay Area. Since 2001, Lorenzo has managed the Alameda County HIV Testing program. Recently, he was involved in an MSM-and-methamphetamine research program. He has traveled to India, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos, indulging his interest in photography.

Isaiah Hurtado

R. Lee Jewell, Co-chair

R. Lee Jewell joined the CAPS CAB in 2006. He is a marriage and family therapist intern (MFTI) since receiving his master’s degree in Clinical Psychology at New College of California. Lee has been actively involved in the HIV/AIDS community since testing positive in 1986. His prior community work includes acting as PWA liaison to the Michigan state legislature, client services director for the San Francisco Center for Living, HIV/AIDS educator (K–12), and SFDPH AIDS Office Reggie Policy board member.

Currently, Lee serves as council co-chair and member of the HIV Health Services Planning Council. “My desire is to see a more integrated and healthy LGBT community, specifically men who have sex with men. HIV/AIDS has propelled us as a community to work towards healthier ways of interacting. I firmly believe we need one another, to work together, to make this happen.”

Loren Jones

Loren Jones has been HIV-positive for approximately 27 years and is the mother and grandmother of two.  She currently serves on the Alameda/Contra Costa County Community Consortium Planning Council for Ryan White Part A Services where she is a voting member of the Person Living With HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) committee, Policy Education and Review Committee, Quality Data and Services committee, and Prevention committee.  She is also a steering committee member for the Positive Women’s Network which is the policy arm of the Oakland-based organization Women Organized to Respond to Life-threatening Diseases (WORLD).

Loren has previously served on the Alameda /Contra Costa part D Executive Committee and on the California State Planning Council. She is also a licensed vocational nurse and a trained peer advocate.

Karl Knapper

Karl Knapper has worked and volunteered in the HIV/AIDS community since the early 1990s, when he began volunteering with the STOP AIDS Project. Karl began working at Shanti in June 2007 as the Connect HIV Project manager, where he tailored and adapted the L.I.F.E. Health Workshop program to reach African Americans and Latino/as living with HIV in San Francisco. Currently, Karl is the local L.I.F.E. program manager, and he manages the San Francisco Positive L.I.F.E. Program, which serves primarily gayand bisexual men; and the Connect HIV Project, which has also begun to serve women. He is planning to expand the Connect HIV Project and Positive L.I.F.E. Program to serve the transgender population in the near future.

Karl is also a writer, filmmaker, film curator, and educator and holds a bachelor of arts degree in communication from Stanford University.

Montica Levy

Montica Levy is a research associate with the San Francisco Department of Public Health HIV vaccine studies. In addition to her clinical duties as a counselor and phlebotomist Ms. Levy is spearheading new efforts to recruit trans participants into the vaccine trials and also serves as co-chair of the Cultural Responsiveness Working Group. Her past work in HIV prevention spans from curriculum development for transfemale-focused HIV prevention workshops to one-on-one sexual health counseling with students at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Ms. Levy has provided HIV counseling and presented workshops both in English and Spanish. She holds a BA in sociology and a BS in health education from SFSU.

Micah E. Lubensky

Micah E. Lubensky (BA, University of California, Berkeley; MS, PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz) is currently the community organizing and mobilizing manager at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF). At SFAF, Micah works with Black Brothers Esteem, a program that supports the holistic well-being and HIV prevention needs of African American gay and bisexual men in low-income neighborhoods of San Francisco, a group disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS. Micah also organizes and directs this community of men in volunteer health-outreach efforts and education projects to impact positively their community as well as the larger African American, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender, low-income, and more general communities of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ramón Ramírez

Ramón has worked with the LGBT communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco for many years, coordinating and managing HIV prevention programs for MSM, MSM/W, transgender individuals, monolingual Spanish-speaking recent immigrants, and HIV-positive individuals. He also has been an HIV testing counselor for 7 years and has been very involved in community issues such as homophobia, transphobia, empowerment, and immigration rights. He has accomplished this by being involved with events and activities such as Mr. and Miss Gay Safe Latino and Latino/a Pride. Ramón is a Latino gay male born in Mexico City, and he is continuing his education in psychology at San Francisco State University.

Edward Tepporn

Edward Tepporn is the HIV program director for the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum(APIAHF), a national health policy organization dedicated to strengthening policies, programs, and research to improve the health and well-being of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. He has over 15 years of experience in the field of HIV/AIDS at the local, national, and international level. Edward has previously served as director of education at Saint Louis Effort for AIDS, community co-chair of Missouri’s statewide HIV/STD Prevention Community Planning Group, associate at Aplomb Consulting, and technical assistance trainer at the Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center.

In 1999, Ed was a selected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to participate in the Price Fellowship for HIV Prevention Leadership. Edward received his bachelor of arts degree in biology and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis.

Ilanito Cerna-Turoff

Ilanito Cerna-Turoff is a longterm activist, researcher, and teacher of race and ethnicity. He is passionate about HIV prevention and care, and his work focuses on people of color and Latino/as, MSM and transgender communities, youth, and other marginalized groups. Currently, he coordinates a research study of high-risk Latino/a youth for UCSF’s Pediatrics Department and a mobile testing project of Black and Latino/a transgender youth at Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center.

Amanda B. Elder

Amanda B. Elder has been on the CAPS CAB since 2004. She is a psychology intern with Community Institute for Psychotherapy in San Rafael and a doctoral candidate at the Wright Institute in Berkeley. Prior to school, she spent 6 years managing HIV testing programs with Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center and Glide Health Services in San Francisco. Amanda also provided capacity-building assistance for rapid HIV testing. She is currently working on her dissertation involving older transgender communities.

Alix Lutnick

Alix Lutnick is the project coordinator for the SWEAT (Sex Worker Environmental Assessment Team) Study conducted by UCSF in collaboration with St. James Infirmary. The SWEAT Study seeks to characterize sexual and drug-using behavior and prevalence of HIV, STIs, HBV, and HCV among female sex workers in San Francisco and to examine the women’s psychological risk factors associated with these infections. Alix received her master of arts degree in human sexuality studies from San Francisco State University in 2004.

Tara Regan

Tara Regan is currently a graduate student at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Tara previously served for over 4 years as the Children and Family Programs manager for Centerforce, a CBO working with prisoners, their families, and persons recently released from jails and prisons in northern and central California. In this role, Tara supervised the San Quentin State Prison (SQSP) Visitors Center, a multiservice hospitality center for visiting loved ones; Families Moving Forward, a family reunification case-management program based at Marin County Jail; Back to Family, a family reunification case-management program based at SQSP; the LIFE mentoring program, which serves youth who have an incarcerated parent; and Live Love Learn, a peer health-education and HIV prevention program working with SQSP women visitors. Tara received her bachelor of science degree in criminal justice and minored in international politics at Northeastern University in Boston.