Events

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Matthew Bonn is an International Board member with International Network of Health and Hepatitis in Substance Users, a knowledge translator for the Dr. Peters Centre and a harm reduction knowledge broker. He was previously the program manager with the Canadian Association of People Who Use Drugs. Matthew’s freelance writing has appeared in publications including The Conversation, Doctors Nova Scotia, Policy Options and The Coast. He was also on the 64th Canadian delegation to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs. He is a current drug user and a formerly incarcerated person.

Andrew Ivsins is a Research Scientist with the BC Centre on Substance Use and Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. He is an investigator with the Qualitative and Community Based Research Program, and employs innovative qualitative and ethnographic approaches to understand how social, environmental, and structural factors shape the health and health inequity of people who use drugs. Andrew’s recent work has focused on the ongoing drug toxicity crisis, including studies exploring the impact of safer supply interventions on the health and wellbeing of people who use drugs. In addition to his research work, Andrew is a senior editor at the International Journal of Drug Policy. Andrew’s work is supported by a Michael Smith Health Research BC – St. Paul’s Foundation/BC Centre on Substance Use Scholar Award.

This session will focus on power, privilege, and oppression in research, and explore strategies for researchers to engage with oppression-impacted communities in a more ethical and productive way. Four community members and researchers will share their perspectives on intersectionality in research, and offer suggestions and strategies for initiating and sustaining equitable partnerships to improve the relevance and impact of public health research.

Tamara Oyola-Santiago is a harm reductionist and public health educator. She is co-founder of Bronx Móvil, a fully bilingual (Spanish/English) anti-racist mutual aid collective and mobile harm reduction and syringe services organization. She is also part of the What Would an HIV Doula Do collective, a community of people joined in response to the ongoing AIDS Crisis, and Director of Public Health Services at The New School.

Camila Gelpí-Acosta is a Puerto Rican cis female with 25+ years of implementing harm reduction programming in Puerto Rico and in NYC. She also conducts NIH extramural research in NYC, specializing on the disease and overdose vulnerabilities of Puerto Rican PWID.

Terrell Jones is the Advocacy and Community Engagement Manager at OnPoint NYC. He is a passionate advocate, activist, and inspiration for drug users, sex workers, the homeless, and other marginalized communities. Terrell is a former drug user who, like many other people of color, was incarcerated because of his drug use. Determined to change the racist drug laws in New York State, stigma associated with drug use and that often resulted in his being denied job and housing opportunities, Terrell became an advocate for drug policy reform, an activist to advance harm reduction throughout New York City and New York State, and a vocal supporter of giving people a second chance. Terrell has now been in the harm reduction field for over 19 years and worked his way up from participant, to peer educator, to staff, and now to the management team.

David Frank is a Medical Sociologist and Research Scientist at the NYU School of Global Public Health. His research focuses on opioid use, opioid use treatment programs like Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT), and the structural and policy context in which opioid use and treatment occurs. He is also someone who has been on methadone maintenance treatment for more than 15 years and uses those experiences in his research to produce scholarship that more accurately reflects the lives and real-world experiences of people who use illegal substances.

About the Increasing Research Relevance Through Community Collaboration Series
Community-engaged research in which community members are true collaborative partners has greater potential for public health relevance than does the traditional model, in which researchers make all of the decisions. True collaboration means the community is an equal research partner with a say in identifying problems, framing research questions and designing projects. Integrating experiential and scientific knowledge builds community capacity and sensitizes researchers to the real impacts of social determinants of health. This is especially important in intervention research, where foundational community input can improve acceptability, feasibility and sustainability. In this series, researchers and community partners will describe collaborative frameworks and share lessons learned from their experiences, including strategies for overcoming historic mistrust and other challenges to establishing equitable partnerships. This series was created in collaboration with our CDUHR Community Coalition.

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Since 2019, nitazenes have replaced fentanyl as the dominant unregulated opioid drug in Estonia, a northeastern European nation with a population of 1.3 million. The purpose of this presentation is to provide the timeline of the nitazene epidemic and the prevalence, patterns, and health consequences of nitazene use in Estonia. The presentation integrates a multi-faceted approach, encompassing administrative statistics, surveillance, and research data from 2019 to 2024. The quantitative data are complemented by qualitative interviews with nitazene users to provide nuanced and contextualized information.

Katri Abel-Ollo currently works as a researcher and thematic field leader in the Department of Drugs and Addictions at the Estonian National Institute for Health Development. She is also the head of the European Union Drugs Agency (EUDA) Estonian focal point. She leads several monitoring and research projects in the field of drug use. Her main research areas have been studies of risk behavior among injecting drug users, studies of syringe residues, studies of drug wastewater, and mapping and quality assessment of prevention, harm, addiction treatment, and rehabilitation services. Over the years, she has been involved in the preparation of many strategic documents in the fields of illicit drugs and infectious diseases.

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In this presentation, Danielle Ompad will help new investigators navigate the complexities of NIH R-series grant applications. While strong science is essential, success often hinges on the often-overlooked elements of grantsmanship—biosketches, environment statements, budget justifications, and letters of support. This presentation will provide strategies for crafting a compelling application that demonstrates readiness, feasibility, and alignment with NIH priorities, equipping ESIs with the tools to enhance their proposals beyond the research plan.

Danielle Ompad is the Deputy Director for CDUHR and Associate Core Director of CDUHR’s Transdisciplinary Research Methods Core. She is also a Professor of Epidemiology at NYU’s School of Global Public Health. Dr. Ompad is an infectious disease epidemiologist with extensive experience in design, conduct, and analysis of community-based cross-sectional and prospective studies. Her research is focused on the health and wellbeing of people living in urban settings, especially communities that are highly marginalized and vulnerable. Many of these communities have high rates of heroin, crack, and/or cocaine use and related harms. Her research is underpinned by a harm reduction perspective, i.e., reducing the negative consequences associated with highly stigmatized drug use and sexual behavior and has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. With respect to drug use, her work has spanned the entire natural history of drug use – from initiation to cessation, with particular attention paid to risk for infectious diseases such as HIV, hepatitis B and C, and STIs. Most recently, she has been studying use of new marijuana products, marijuana edibles packaging, and drug use among construction workers.

In this panel presentation, K grant recipients will provide their insights into applying for K awards.

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This presentation will examine health disparities faced by Black women in California, including among those who inject drugs. The findings are from the 2022 National HIV Behavioral Surveillance (NHBS) survey in San Francisco and highlight the results of HIV testing and awareness of PrEP among people who inject drugs. In addition, existing barriers will be discussed in healthcare provider engagement and review interventions aimed at improving HIV testing and PrEP uptake in this population.

Taqwa Brookins is the Program Manager for the Research in Implementation Science for Equity (RISE) Fellowship in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Previously, she worked as the Program Coordinator for the Recent HIV Infection Surveillance project at UCSF’s Institute for Global Health Sciences. She is interested in health disparities research among stigmatized populations and the role of intersecting identities in shaping health outcomes. Ms. Brookins is studying Health Policy and Law at the joint UCSF and UC Law SF’s Master’s program in Fall 2025.
Erin Wilson is a Senior Research Scientist at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. She is joint PI for the San Francisco National HIV Behavioral Surveillance Site and provided oversight for implementation of the PWID cycle in 2022. Her other research is multi-level HIV status neutral interventions addressing structural factors like stigma among trans women and youth in San Francisco, Louisiana, Nepal and Brazil.

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Tyler Bartholomew, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Health Services Research & Policy at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s Department of Public Health Sciences. He is the co-Principal Investigator of the UM IDEA Lab whose mission is to implement, disseminate, educate, and advocate for the health of people who use drugs. His research has focused on developing, testing, and implementing interventions to address the substance use and infectious disease syndemic, leveraging data-driven approaches to improve health services, systems, and policy implementation for this population. Dr. Bartholomew led the research and evaluation efforts of the IDEA Miami Syringe Services Program (SSP), the first legal syringe services program in Florida. His research and advocacy efforts translated into statewide legislation allowing all counties in Florida to implement these evidence-based programs in 2019.

His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Gilead Sciences and has resulted in over 60 publications in high impact journals including: American Journal of Public Health, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Addiction, and International Journal of Drug Policy. He currently leads 3 NIDA-funded trials investigating the effectiveness of a peer-driven, telehealth-enhanced model of care for HIV treatment, PrEP and medications for opioid use disorder among people who inject drugs and a national implementation science trial of routine point-of-care HIV and hepatitis C testing at syringe services programs. He is an investigator in the Clinical Trials Network Florida Node Alliance funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He currently supports statewide implementation of SSPs in Florida through a partnership with the Florida Harm Reduction Collective where they leverage community-driven implementation science to improve adoption, implementation, and sustainment of programs. Dr. Bartholomew received his PhD in Prevention Science from the University of Miami.

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José Diaz, PhD

Examining the Impact of Intersectional Stigma and Resilience on Substance Use Treatment Utilization Among Latinx Men Who Have Sex With Men

Mentors: Dustin Duncan, Sabina Hirshfield, and Carlos Rodriguez-Diaz

Justin Knox, PhD

Formative Research on How to Deliver Alcohol Interventions in the Context of HIV Prevention and Care among Black Sexual Minority Men

Mentors: Dustin Duncan, Elvin Geng, John Schneider, Donna Shelley, and Scott Sherman

Cho-Hee Shrader, PhD, MPH

Feasibility of a Sociocentric Network-based Respondent Driven Sampling Recruitment Method for HIV Prevention Programming among Black, Latino, and Caribbean Men Who Have Sex With Men and Use Drugs: A Multilevel Implementation Science Study

Mentors: Dustin Duncan and Danielle Ompad

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In collaboration with Don Des Jarlais and his team, Dr. Bobashev developed an agent-based model (ABM) that describes the transmission of HIV in a population of people who inject drugs in NYC and Vietnam. They show that under general assumptions the transmission rate is very low, but small outbreaks are possible in tightly connected communities. Dr. Bobashev will discuss how ABMs can provide insight into disease transmission in complex systems where many factors are at play. Conducting multiple simulations allows us to focus not only on the means or most likely scenarios but at some rare but extreme cases leading to notable outbreaks.

Georgiy Bobashev is a Senior Fellow at RTI International with more than 20 years of experience in health research. His current research interests follow two major areas: predictive modeling and studies of substance use and risky behaviors. Predictive methods often combine mechanistic (e.g., agent-based and system dynamics) and machine learning techniques. Dr. Bobashev has applied modeling, statistical analysis and experimental design to a variety of health- and policy-related areas, including substance use, HIV, child/maternal health, influenza, cancer, diabetes, and violent behavior. He has been a principal investigator and co-investigator on numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

In addition to his RTI duties, Dr. Bobashev is an adjunct Professor at the Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University, adjunct Professor at the NYU School of Global Public Health, and a Professor at the Data Science Tech Institute in Sofia Antipolis, France.

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Shruti Mehta is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She received a Master’s in Public Health (1997) and a PhD (2002) in Epidemiology also from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research focuses on HIV and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection among people who inject drugs (PWID) in the US and in India with a particular interest and focus on identifying and overcoming barriers to access care and treatment for HIV and HCV.

Dr. Mehta has led research programs in Baltimore and India that have produced more than 350 peer-reviewed papers. She has been continuously funded for more than 20 years with grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the National Science Foundation.

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Photovoice is a participatory, qualitative research approach where participants use photography and stories about their photos to identify and represent issues of importance to them enabling researchers to gain a greater understanding of the topic under study. Dr. Walters will present the theoretical origins and practical applications of the method using examples of their respective research studies among individuals in marginalized communities including those who use drugs and are affected by HIV.

Suzan Walters is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Epidemiology in the Department of Population Health at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and an affiliated researcher at the Center for Drug Use and HIV/HCV Research (CDUHR) at New York University. Her mixed-methods research focuses on the social and structural determinants of health among drug using populations. Her current K01 grant focuses on how intersectional stigma experiences affect health outcomes among people who use drugs. Dr. Walter’s current CDUHR-funded pilot study is exploring barriers and facilitators to PrEP, harm reduction, and use of Overdose Prevention Centers using Photovoice, a community-based, participatory research methodology.

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This talk will explore the social and structural factors contributing to racial inequities in HIV. Additionally, it will highlight effective structural interventions aimed at reducing these disparities.

Natalie Crawford is an Associate Professor in Behavioral, Social and Health Education Sciences in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. She serves as the Co-Director of the Prevention and Implementation Sciences Core in the Center for AIDS Research at Emory. Trained in social epidemiology, she received her PhD and MPH in Epidemiology from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Crawford completed her post-doctoral training at the University of Michigan as a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar. She graduated from Spelman College where she trained in Women Studies and Biochemistry. Her NIMH-supported research examines the impact of structural interventions in pharmacies on reducing racial inequities in HIV. She is currently advancing the implementation science of HIV prevention services in pharmacies in the US Southeast.

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Foresight research helps us consider various future scenarios and how to prepare for them. This is crucial in drug policy where decisions can significantly impact society and people who use drugs. In his presentation, Tuukka Tammi will explore strategic foresight as a method that has so far been underutilized in social sciences and discuss its relevance for drug policy research, the tools it employs, and its practical applications. He will also share key findings from a recent study examining Finland’s drug policy trajectory toward 2030.

For further reading, the article on which the presentation is based: Unlu, A, Viskari, I, Rönkä, S, & Tammi, T (2024). Developing strategic foresight for drug policy: trends, scenarios, and implications. Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 1–16. doi: 10.1080/09687637.2024.2331574

Tuukka Tammi, PhD, is a Lead Expert at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL). His research interests are related to public and social policy analysis, health and social care system research and development, research into social problems, especially addiction research, as well as strategic foresight. Tuukka Tammi is also an associate professor (title of docent) at the Universities of Helsinki and Tampere.

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Dương Thị Hương is Associate Professor, Senior Lecturer, and Formal Dean of Faculty of Public Health at the Hai Phong University of Medicine and Pharmacy. Dr. Huong has had numerous projects funded by the French National Research Agency for AIDS Research (ANRS) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse focused on HIV, HCV, and related infections in people who inject drugs (PWID).

Drug Use & Infections in Vietnam (DRIVE) aimed to end the HIV epidemic among people who inject drugs in Hai Phong, Vietnam (NIDA R01DA041978/ANRS 12353) and ran from 2016 to 2021. DRIVE has been a foundation for several subsequent initiatives, including DRIVE-C (Drug Use & Infections in Vietnam – Hepatitis C) (ANRS 12380), which focused on HCV elimination; DRIVE-MIND Mental Health Intervention for Injecting Drug Users, (ANRS 12410); DRIVE-COVID (ANRS COV22), which evaluated the impact of lockdown measures on HIV and HCV risk behaviors and access to prevention and care during the COVID-19 epidemic for PWID in Hai Phong; and DRIVE-TB Tuberculosis Control, (ANRS 0092, co-funded by NIDA, ANRS|MIE, and L’initiative-Expertise France), aimed at tuberculosis elimination among PWIDs. These projects have resulted in publications in over 20 international journals. The Community HIV Epidemiological Evaluation and Response (CHEER) program has utilized the DRIVE model to evaluate the HIV epidemic in other provinces.