People

Suzan Walters
Suzan M. Walters, PhD
NYU School of Global Public Health - Research Assistant Professor
Email: suzanmwalters@nyu.edu
Education
PhD, Sociology, Stony Brook University
MA, Sociology, St. John’s University
BA, Philosphy, University of California, Riverside
Research Interests
Medical sociology, social determinants of health, substance use, intersectional stigma, gender, sexualities, HIV/AIDS, social networks
BIO
Suzan Walters is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Global Public Health and an affiliated researcher at the Center for Drug Use and HIV/HCV Research at New York University (NYU).  She has completed two postdoctoral fellowships focused on interdisciplinary drug use research: the Behavioral Sciences Training in Drug Abuse Research program at NYU and the Interdisciplinary Research and Training Institute on Hispanic Drug Use at the University of Southern California. Her mixed-methods research focuses on the social and structural determinants of health among drug using populations.  In particular she focuses on awareness, knowledge and access to biomedical interventions as part of larger social processes of exclusion. Her current K01 grant focuses on how intersectional stigma experiences affect health outcomes among people who use drugs. She has worked as an ethnographer for the National HIV Behavioral Surveillance System, a program director for the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities, and a research fellow for AIDS Foundation Chicago. Her research has been supported by the National Institutes for Health, American Sociological Association, Sociologists for Women and Society, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, Sociology AIDS Network, and Stony Brook University.
Projects
Principal Investigator, Intersectional Stigma Experiences, Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), and Other Service Use Among People Who Inject Drugs. Active
Principal Investigator, Qualitative Assessment of the First Government Sanctioned Overdose Prevention Center in the United States. Active
Principal Investigator, Feasibility of PrEP for Persons Who Inject Drugs. Completed
Publications

Recent

Sibley AL, Baker R, Levander XA, Rains A, Walters SM, Nolte K, Colston DC, Piscalko HM, Schalkoff CA, Bianchet E, Chen S, Dowd P, Jaeb M, Friedmann PD, Fredericksen RJ, Seal DW, Go VF (2023).
“I am not a junkie”: Social categorization and differentiation among people who use drugs
International Journal of Drug Policy, 114, 103999. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2023.103999.

Walters SM, Liu W, Lamuda P, Huh J, Brewer R, Johnson O, Bluthenthal RN, Taylor B, Schneider JA (2023).
A national portrait of public attitudes toward opioid use in the US: A latent class analysis
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20 (5), 4455. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20054455. PMCID: PMC10001548.

Walters SM, Kerr J, Cano M, Earnshaw V, Link B (2023).
Intersectional stigma as a fundamental cause of health disparities: A case study of how drug use stigma intersecting with racism and xenophobia creates health inequities for Black and Hispanic persons who use drugs over time
Stigma and Health [Epub 2023 Mar 2]. doi: 10.1037/sah0000426.

Walters SM, Frank D, Felsher M, Jaiswal J, Fletcher S, Bennett AS, Friedman SR, Ouellet LJ, Ompad DC, Jenkins W, Pho MT (2023).
How the rural risk environment underpins hepatitis C risk: Qualitative findings from rural southern Illinois, United States
International Journal of Drug Policy, 112, 103930. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2022.103930. PMCID: PMC9974910.

Walters SM, Felsher M, Frank D, Jaiswal J, Townsend T, Muncan B, Bennett AS, Friedman SR, Jenkins W, Pho MT, Fletcher S, Ompad DC (2023).
I don’t believe a person has to die when trying to get high: Overdose prevention and response strategies in rural Illinois
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20 (2), 1648. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20021648. PMCID: PMC9864395.

Dr. Walters' Google Scholar Profile
Selected Press