Co-Directors
Marguerita Lightfoot, PhD
Associate Professor
Co-Director, CAPS
Dr. Marguerita Lightfoot is Co-Director of director of the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) and Director of the Technology and Information Exchange (TIE) Core. Dr. Lightfoot is a counseling psychologist whose research has included HIV prevention work in the juvenile justice system and with runaway and homeless youths in Los Angeles. One particular focus of her research with adolescents has been to adapt and utilize interactive and engaging delivery of HIV preventive activities on computers. In addition, she has worked as a Mental Health Clinician at a mental health clinic that served primarily low-income people of color. She’s conducted psychotherapy with predominately African American and Latino adults, couples, and families infected and/or affected by HIV. She is particularly interested in developing cost-effective interventions that are easily translatable with utility in community settings and utilizes new technologies to engage disenfranchised individuals in health promotion activities. She has a unique ability to determine the programmatic needs of the most vulnerable populations and develop programs that are cutting-edge and likely to successfully engage these populations to increase mental health functioning and well-being. A notable, ongoing research project has been adapting interventions to reduce HIV-related risk among urban street youths and youths living with HIV in Uganda.
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Diane Binson, PhD
Associate Adjunct Professor, Department of Medicine
Co-Director
Dr. Binson is a sociologist with expertise in research methods and research related to the social context of HIV risk. She has been at CAPS since 1991 and has mentored colleagues in various capacities. She has conducted multiple studies related to the context of sexual risk among men who have sex with men using both quantitative and qualitative methods, has published widely, and has a long history of research collaboration with community partners.
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 item and survey design. She 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. She is currently in the process of analyzing data from an R01 study that examined an alternative method of survey administration.
Dr. Binson’s work on sexual risk has focused on how the physical, social and normative environments of risk settings condition individuals’ HIV-related risk behavior. Several NIMH grants provided funding to examine the process by which HIV/AIDS prevention policies and programs are incorporated into risk settings and sex-club environments resulting in varied outcomes of risk and/or preventive behaviors. In a recent multi-method study Dr. Binson examined how participants script their sexual encounters in different types of sex venues and how the venue environments differentially influence risk.
In collaborative research with community partners, Dr. Binson has conducted a number of evaluation studies to assess the efficacy of programs to reduce HIV-related risk among men who have sex with men, counseling and testing programs in minority communities, and HIV/STD-risk reduction program among young men being released from prison. She recently 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.
Torsten B. Neilands, PhD [Quantitative Methods, Social Psychology]
Associate 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 at the University of Texas at Austin academic computing center. During this time Dr. Neilands also received funding from the Norwegian Research Council as a co-principal investigator for a three-year study.
Dr. Neilands is 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 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 CAPS. His substantive interests include STD awareness, education, and prevention; HIV medication adherence issues; and stress and coping theory.
Dr. Neilands 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 provides guidance in survey instrument development, hypothesis generation, and study design issues.
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Program Faculty Mentors
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 B. 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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James L. Sorensen, PhD
Professor In Residence, Department of Psychiatry
James Sorensen is Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry. His work in the substance abuse treatment research area began 20+ years ago, directing a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)-funded double-blind investigation of detoxification from heroin. He developed and evaluated a community network approach to drug abuse treatment, assessed family therapy’s efficacy with methadone maintenance patients, tested the efficacy of small-group HIV education with drug users in three treatment modalities, and evaluated the impact of case management for substance abusers with HIV/AIDS. Currently, he is investigating the utility of treating methadone maintenance patients in a therapeutic community. Dr. Sorensen also leads the California-Arizona Research Node of the NIDA Clinical Trials Network Program. This effort joins researchers and clinical treatment programs in conducting clinical trials of treatments that have been found to be useful in research but have not yet experienced widespread dissemination to the field.
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Affiliated Faculty
Olga Grinstead Reznick, PhD, MPH [Clinical Psychology, Public Health - Epidemiology]
Professor Emeritus, Department of Medicine
Dr. Reznick has been a researcher at CAPS since 1990, first as a fellow in theTraineeship 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. Reznick 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. Reznick 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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Last modified: May 7, 2012