Faculty in RI

Biographical Sketches of

Brown University AIDS Program

Faculty Members

BRUNAP DIRECTORS

Kenneth H. Mayer, MD
Kenneth H. Mayer has studied the natural history of HIV and the biological and prevention aspects of HIV acquisition and transmission since the start of epidemic. He led research teams that documented the first cases of HIV in New England. He studied the heterosexual spread of HIV and viral HIV expression in the male and female genital tracts. He led prevention research studies, including behavioral interventions, microbicides, and vaccine trials. He is also the principal investigator of an international training grant funded by the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Mayer is the Director of the Brown University AIDS Program.

Karen T. Tashima, MD
Karen T. Tashima MD FACP is the Associate Director of the Brown University AIDS Program. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Program Director of Infectious Disease Fellowship at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She currently is the Director of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group at the Miriam Hospital/Brown University. She received her BA from Harvard University and her MD from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Tashima has been working in HIV care since 1998 and has published over 200 articles in peer‐reviewed journals on all aspects of HIV care.

 

 

BRUNAP FACULTY

Nicole Alexander, MD
Originally from Brooklyn, NY, Dr. Nicole Everline Alexander attended college at Cornell University, majoring in Human Development and Family Studies. She graduated in 2001 from SUNY Upstate Medical University at Syracuse, and subsequently completed a combined Internal Medicine-Pediatrics residency at SUNY Stony Brook University Hospital in 2005. Recently in 2009, Dr. Alexander finished a 4-year combined fellowship in adult and pediatric Infectious Diseases. She now attends as faculty in the adult and pediatric Infectious Disease divisions, as assistant professor of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics. Her research interest is health disparities and advocacy relating to infectious diseases; including improving access to care in medically underserved populations.

Curt Beckwith, MD
Dr. Beckwith, Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, is actively investigating new and innovative approaches to HIV testing. New strategies of HIV testing are needed given approximately one-third of persons in the United States are unaware of their infection. Dr. Beckwith is exploring the implementation of new HIV testing strategies including: routine testing; opt-out testing; and rapid HIV testing. Each of these strategies has the potential to be implemented in traditional testing sites (such as doctor's offices and hospital) and non-traditional sites (such as prisons & jails, emergency departments & urgent care centers, STD clinics, and substance abuse treatment centers.

Robert Boland, MD
Robert Boland MD is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior. His specialization is in psychosomatic medicine and geriatric psychiatry. Professionally, he has had a lead role in the department in the development and implementation of education in psychiatry. Nationally he advises and presents on the use of technology in medical school education. Dr. Boland’s interests include the psychiatric aspects of HIV. Robert Boland was a collaborator on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-sponsored HERS (HIV Epidemiologic Research Study) grant, which was designed to study the natural course of HIV infection in women with HIV. His role was to concentrate on the psychiatric aspects of HIV infection, particularly the role of depression in quality of life and the progression of disease.

Larry K. Brown, MD
Dr. Larry K. Brown is Director of the Behavioral and Social Sciences Program of the Lifespan / Tufts / Brown CFAR. He is Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and is Director of Research in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital. He completed his medical education at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and his General Psychiatry residency and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry fellowship at Stanford University. He is currently the Chair of the NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences HIV/AIDS Study Section. His research focuses on HIV risk among adolescents and the development of effective prevention programs, especially for adolescents with psychiatric disorders. He is the principal investigator of several major projects funded by NIMH that are developing and testing a variety of new interventions such as a family-based intervention, an emotion regulation intervention, or the use of a media campaign.

Charles Carpenter, MD
Dr. Carpenter has been involved in the care of persons living with HIV since 1982. He served as the site Director of the longitudinal CDC-supported HIV Epidemiology Research Study (HERS) from 1992-1999, and is now Principal Investigator of the CDC-supported SUN Study of the Natural History of HIV/AIDS in the era of effective antiretroviral therapy. Dr. Carpenter has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Brown University Fogarty AITRP Program since its inception, has participated in the training of Fogarty fellows from each of the participating sites, and is currently involved in on-going research in Chennai, India. Dr. Carpenter is Director of the Lifespan/Tufts/Brown Center for AIDS Research. He currently serves as Chair of the Treatment Subcommittee of the Congressionally mandated NAS/IOM Committee to evaluate the President's Emergency Plan for HIV/AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

E. Jane Carter, MD
Dr. Carter’s interest focuses on Tuberculosis Program Development and Care Delivery. TB is both the leading killer from a single infectious agent in the world as well as the leading cause of death in patients living with HIV globally. Her work focuses both locally is at the RI TB Clinic as well as internationally (primarily in Kenya) to develop community based care programs, promote DOTS expansion, new TB diagnostics for the developing world and coordinated care programs for TB/HIV.

Susan Cu-Uvin, MD
Dr. Susan Cu-Uvin is an Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Medicine at Brown University. She is the Director of the Immunology Center at the Miriam Hospital, Brown University, a clinic that serves almost 1,200 HIV infected patients. She is also the director of the Women and AIDS Core, for the Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) at Brown University. She is director of the Research program of the Brown/ Women and Infants Hospital Center of Excellence in Women's Health. She devotes 100% of her time to HIV related care and clinical research. She was the Chair of the Women's Health Committee of the Adult AIDS Clinical Trials Group (AACTG) from 2004-2006. She is the Principal Investigator of an RO1 to assess antiviral therapy and HIV in the female genital tract (AI40350), an co-PI of an RO3 to assess HIV-1 genital tract shedding among Cambodian women (TW6981), and a World AIDS Foundation grant to establish a HIV women's clinic in Cambodia and provide training to Cambodian health care professionals for research readiness for future projects related to HIV in women. She is a co-investigator of the CDC funded study to understand the natural history of HIV and AIDS in the era of highly active antiretroviral therapy (SUN). She served on the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Perinatal Transmission of HIV to investigate interventions to decrease vertical transmission of HIV within the United States. She chaired the NIH advisory committee on HIV related research in women and girls in 2008 and is a member of the NIH advisory committee on HIV related research in microbicides. She is also a member of the Global Microbicide Project scientific advisory group. She is a member of the Fogarty Executive Committee at Brown University and has been a very active mentor for international trainees in HIV/AIDS care and research.

Timothy Flanigan, MD
Dr. Flanigan is the Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Rhode Island and The Miriam Hospitals and the Alpert Medical School.  He came to the Alpert Medical School in 1991 to help establish a network of primary care for HIV infected individuals with a particular focus on women, substance abusers and individuals leaving prison.  Dr. Flanigan developed the HIV Core Program at the State Prison to provide care for HIV infected individuals and link them to community based resources upon release. Over 70% of individuals in Rhode Island who are HIV infected link with primary medical care at The Immunology Center.  Dr. Flanigan is the PI on The Miriam/Brown AIDS Clinical Trials Unit to develop more effective therapies for the treatment of HIV. He is also associate director of The Miriam/Brown Fogarty Program which trains and mentors overseas investigators in HIV/AIDS.  He was the recipient of a community health leadership award from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for the development of outstanding primary care for underserved HIV infected individuals. In 2005, he received an honorary doctorate from Salve Regina University for his support of educational opportunities for children of incarcerated parents.

Peter D. Friedmann, MD, MPH
Dr. Friedmann, an Associate Professor of Medicine & Community Health, is an established substance abuse health services researcher and addiction medicine physician who has published extensively on the organization of addiction treatment services, treatment process and outcomes, and the role of primary care physicians in the diagnosis and treatment of substance use disorders. In 2000, he received the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar award to develop and pilot test a relapse prevention practice guideline in primary care settings. Dr. Friedmann has performed multilevel, random-effects analyses of two multisite studies - the Drug Abuse Treatment Outcome Study (DATOS) and the National Treatment Improvement Evaluation Study (NTIES). As the principal investigator (PI) of the Rhode Island Research Center of the National Institute on Drug Abuse's (NIDA's) Criminal Justice Drug Abuse Treatment Studies (see www.cjdats.org), he is lead investigator of Step'n Out, a multisite, randomized clinical trial of collaborative behavioral management that integrates parole and outpatient addiction treatment for parolees. He is also PI of an ongoing National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)-funded randomized, double-blind placebo controlled trial of trazodone for sleep-disturbed alcoholic persons. He is co-PI of a Health Resources Services Administration Special Projects of National Significance (HRSA SPNS) grant to integrate HIV and buprenorphine treatment in the HIV primary care setting at Miriam Hospital. He also directs the "Program to Integrate Psychosocial & Health Services in Chronic Disease & Disability," a center for health services and translational research at the Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC).

Joseph Harwell, MD
Dr. Harwell is particularly interested in understanding the determinants of sexual and mother to child HIV transmission and to identifying ways to intervene to help prevent this transmission. One way he is doing this is through the study of cervicovaginal HIV RNA levels, particularly among women receiving antiretroviral therapy. Because the bulk of HIV infections occur outside of the United States, he has  been developing programs to study these factors in clinical settings where HIV is highly endemic. In addition, to improve the quality of the care delivered, we have been studying some of the basic epidemiology of HIV-infected populations in these settings, including the spectrum of opportunistic infections and barriers to care.

Rami Kantor, MD, M, AAHIVME
Rami Kantor MD, M, AAHIVME is an internal medicine and infectious diseases physician, and an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He came to Brown University in January 2005, after a post-doctoral HIV research fellowship at Stanford University in California. He is an attending physician at The Miriam Hospital in Providence, where he sees outpatients and inpatients. His research focuses on the evolution of HIV drug resistance to antiretroviral medications, which jeopardizes treatment success. The research incorporates bioinformatics, sequence and phylogenetic analyses, databases and data management, as well as basic science laboratory research. More specifically, he studies the evolution of drug resistance locally, as well as in HIV variants that predominate in resource-limited settings and in developing countries, where the majority of the AIDS epidemic is located. He is part of many national and international collaborations and networks, and advises to the World Health Organization HIV Resistance Network. He is the co-principal investigator on an NIH RO1 and other NIH grants, to study HIV drug resistance in diverse global variants such as in India, China, Thailand and Kenya. He is also the Director of Research for the Brown University – Kenya Program.

Erna Milunka Kojic, MD
Erna Milunka Kojic, MD is an assistant professor of internal medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She has subspecialty certification in Infectious Diseases. Dr. Kojic's current research is on HPV/HIV co-infection in women. She is currently studying anogenital HPV infections and related diseases of HIV in women and is chairing an AIDS Clinical Trial Group (ACTG) study on the safety of the Quadrivalent HPV vaccine in HIV infected women. This pilot research study seeks to assess the safety and immunogenicity of the HPV vaccine among HIV infected women with different CD4 counts and viral loads.

Michelle Lally, MD
Following her graduation from Boston College magna cum laude with a degree in Biochemistry and Philosophy in 1989, Dr. Michelle Lally pursued her education in medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. She graduated in 1993, and continued her post-graduate training with an Internship in Internal Medicine and Residency in Internal Medicine at the New England Deaconess Hospital, affiliated with Harvard Medical School, where from 1996-1997 she served as a clinical fellow in Infectious Diseases. She then completed her Research Fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and remained at the Harvard School of Public Health to earn her M.Sc. in Epidemiology in 1999. She accepted an Assistant Professorship at Brown University Medical School that same year. Dr.  Lally serves as the Director of the HIV Vaccine Clinical Trials Unit for Brown University/The Miriam Hospital; her primary research interests include HIV prevention, testing, and vaccine development. Her attention also focuses on health care disparity, access to HIV and other STD education, testing, and treatment, and the representation of women and minorities in clinical trials. She has also worked extensively in the area of rapid HIV testing and its potential community applications.

Mark Lurie, PhD
Mark Lurie, Ph.D., is a social epidemiologist working on the HIV/AIDS, STI, and TB in sub-Saharan Africa. He has studied the role of migration in the spread of HIV in South Africa, examined the evidence for concurrency as a major driver of the HIV epidemic, and his current research, through an NIH R-01 examines the impact of antiretroviral therapy on HIV epidemic dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa. Dr. Lurie, a native South African, earned his Masters Degree in African History from the University of Florida in 1991 and his PhD in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health in 2001. Dr. Lurie's main research focus is on the public health impact of antiretroviral (ART) HIV therapy in Sub-Saharan Africa. He has examined the impact of ART on secondary HIV transmission in South Africa through a NIH Mentored Research Scientist Development Award (K-01) grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.  Dr. Lurie's newest project attempts to quantify the impact of antiretroviral therapy on HIV epidemic dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa, a collaboration with the Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies in KwaZulu/Natal, South Africa and Erasmus Medical College in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.  In addition to the above collaborations, Dr. Lurie also works closely with colleagues at the Agincourt Demographic Surveillance System in Limpopo Province, South Africa (examining issues of migration and health); the Perinatal HIV Research Unit at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, South Africa (focusing on behavioral issues among a clinical cohort of HIV-infected urban and rural patients); The South African Medical Research Council's Health Systems Research Unit in Cape Town (examining the feasibility of a HIV prevention among a group of HIV-positive patients).

Roland Clayton Merchant, MD, MPH, ScD
Roland C. Merchant MD MPH ScD, is Associate Professor, Emergency Medicine and Community Health, at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He is Associate Director of the Research Section of the Department of Emergency Medicine. He is an emergency medicine physician, researcher, and a clinical epidemiologist. He serves as an emergency medicine attending physician in the emergency departments at Hasbro Children’s Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital. His research interests include screening, educational outreach, and interventions for HIV and hepatitis, as well as evaluation and treatment for blood or body fluid exposures. Dr. Merchant is co-principal investigator on an RO1 from NIDA (R01 DA026066) to conduct research on brief interventions to decrease drug misuse, behaviors that support drug misuse, and the negative consequences of drug misuse. He also is a principal investigator for a NIDA R21 (R21 DA028645) to support his research on combined screening for HIV and hepatitis B/C in the emergency department. He is principal investigator on a R21 (R21 NR011997) from NINR to develop a culturally-appropriate educational video for Spanish-speaking Latinos and Latinas.

Brian Montague, DO, MS, MPH
Dr. Brian Montague is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brown University and the Miriam Hospital. He received his medical and public health degrees from the University of North Texas Health Sciences Center. He completed postgraduate training in Primary Care Internal Medicine at Yale, followed by HIV specialty training in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brown University. He holds HIV Specialist certification through the American Academy of HIV Medicine and is a provider of HIV care services at the Miriam Hospital Immunology Center as well as Rhode Island Hospital and the Thundermist Community Health Center in Woonsocket, RI. He is an active member of the Miriam Hospital Quality Improvement Committee and has been a participant in multiple initiatives to improve continuity of care and linkages to care for patients with HIV in the greater Rhode Island area. His academic interests lie in the areas of global health, health systems, medical informatics, HIV medicine, hepatitis treatment, and tuberculosis.

Kathleen Morrow, PhD
Kathleen Morrow, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Human Behavior and The Miriam Hospital. Her research focuses on behavioral HIV/STD prevention interventions, and the development of biomedical products and devices for HIV/STD prevention, including acceptability of and adherence to experimental vaginal (and rectal) microbicides. Her work, conducted both domestically and internationally, incorporates quantitative, as well as qualitative and mixed methodologies. Dr. Morrow received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Western Michigan University. She completed an NIAAA Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Centers for Alcohol & Addiction Studies at Brown University and is currently Associate Professor (Research) in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and Staff Psychologist at The Miriam Hospital. Her primary research interests focus on the behavioral prevention of HIV and STD infection through the development of biomedical and behavioral prevention interventions, and the exploration of biophysical, behavioral, and social (contextual) factors impacting prevention behaviors.

Don Operario, PhD
Don Operario is Associate Professor of Medical Sciences in the Department of Community Health. He was trained as a Social and Health Psychologist (BA, UCLA; MS, PhD, UMass Amherst; Postdoctoral Fellow, UC San Francisco). He was previously on the faculty of the University of Oxford (Department of Social Policy and Social Work) and before that was at the University of California San Francisco (Center for AIDS Prevention Studies - Department of Medicine). His research addresses two inter-related areas. The first general area is the social context of HIV transmission and the social sequelae of HIV/AIDS in affected communities, with an emphasis on developing and evaluating theory-based social and behavioral interventions in high-risk groups. A second research area is the lived experiences associated with social inequality, with an emphasis on understanding the perspectives of disadvantaged group members and addressing associated health and psychosocial disparities. He conducts research addressing both U.S. domestic and international public health issues.

Bharat Ramratnam, AB, MD
Dr. Ramratnam received undergraduate and medical education at Brown University. Following clinical training, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at The Rockefeller University and is now the head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology, Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, Alpert Medical School. His focus is on defining the key cellular components that impact the replication of viruses such as HIV-1, herpes simplex virus (HSV) one and two, influenza, and hepatitis B/C. He uses a variety of genetic and proteonomic techniques to identify host factors that impact viral replication, some of which may constitute novel targets for pharmacotherapy.

Aadia Rana, MD
Dr. Aadia Rana is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She obtained her medical degree from the University of Alabama School of Medicine and completed her medicine residency at Case Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio. She has recently completed a combined clinical Infectious Diseases and HIV Research fellowship at Brown with a research focus on retention in care for HIV infected minority women. She is also sub-investigator of The Miriam’s Hospital AIDS Clinical Trial Unit, and works as a clinical consultant for the Clinton Foundation’s Health Access Initiative expanding antiretroviral therapy care and treatment in Indonesia.

Josiah Rich, MD, MPH
Josiah D. Rich, MD, MPH is a Professor of Medicine and Community Health at Brown Medical School and attending Physician at The Miriam Hospital. He has expertise in the overlap between infectious diseases and addiction. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed publications and has federal funding for research, prevention and care for substance-using populations. consultant on the American International Health Alliance funded by Providence-Togliatti, Sumara, Russia exchange project. He is the Director and co-founder of The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at The Miriam Hospital Immunology Center.

Cynthia Rosengard, PhD, MPH
Dr. Rosengard received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Connecticut in 1994. Subsequently, she completed a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in Psychology and Medicine and Adolescent Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and served on the faculty of the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology in Palo Alto, CA for five years. She joined the Research Unit of the Division of Genernal Internal Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital in September, 2001. In December of 2002, she was awarded a career development award from the National Institute of Mental Health entitled "Partner-specific Factors in Adolescent Sexual Behavior." In September of 2006, she was awarded an independent investigator award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse entitled "Partner-specific HIV Risk Reduction for Drug Using Incarcerated Adolescents" which will run through May of 2010. She serves as co-investigator on three additional projects with colleagues -- all related to adolescent HIV risk behaviors and/or pregnancy. In May of 2005, Dr. Rosengard completed work on her masters of public health program and received her MPH from Brown University. In November of 2008, Dr. Rosengard joined the Division of Research, Department of OB/GYN at Women & Infants Hospital.

Steven Schechter, MD, FACS, FASCRS
Dr. Schechter graduated from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry with Distinction in Research. Dr. Schechter specializes in colorectal surgery and, specifically, anal dysplasia and colorectal cancers in HIV infected men.

Peter Shank, PhD
Peter Shank received his BS from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF working with Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus on retroviruses. He joined the Brown faculty in 1978 and has worked with both avian and human retroviruses. He has published on extensively on the molecular biology of retroviruses and has served on editorial boards and numerous NIH review panels. His laboratory worked on the regulatory genes of the AIDS retrovirus HIV-1. He is particularly interested in understanding the mechanism of action of the tat gene. This essential positive regulatory gene is unique among transcriptional activators in that the gene product interacts with an RNA structure at the end of the HIV-1 genome. It is his hope that by understanding the mechanism of action of this gene, he and his team will be able to design effective antiviral therapeutics. He and his team are also examining the action of similar genes from HIV-2 and simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV). AIDS patients frequently present with B-cell malignancies and he is interested in asking whether the virus played a direct role in this disease. In collaboration with Dr. Surendra Sharma we were able to show that HIV-1 can infect human B-cells in culture in a CD4 independent manner

Emma Simmons, MD
Dr. Simmons joined the Department of Family Medicine in July 2002. She received her M.PH. from Brown University in 2004. She joined the research faculty in the Center for Primary Care & Prevention at MHRI in July 2004. Her interests include HIV diagnosis, prevention, and linkage to treatment among underserved populations. Her efforts are focused on identifying and removing the barriers to early HIV/AIDS testing in the primary care setting. Dr. Simmons has a panel of patients in the Family Care Center and serves as an attending physician on the Family Medicine Services and in the Immunology Center at Miriam Hospital. Dr. Simmons' area of research is in understanding the barriers to and the utility of routine testing for HIV. Her research focuses on improved understanding of the stigma associated with HIV testing and overcoming barriers to routine HIV testing. Routine HIV testing has the promise to (1) identify people earlier in the course of their infection, therefore preventing the spread of disease by unknown carriers, (2) provide linkage to earlier and more effective treatment leading to improved health and longevity of affected patients, and (3) decrease the disparate rate of AIDS morbidity and mortality among Blacks and Latinos here in the United States of America.

Gail Skowron, MD
Dr. Skowron completed medical school at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and went on to do her residency in Internal Medicine at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center.  Subsequently, she pursued an Infectious Disease Fellowship and worked closely with Dr. Tom Merigan at Stanford in developing new HIV therapies.  She is widely regarded nationally for expertise in HIV clinical trials, where she has made an outstanding contribution.

Anne Sliney, RN, ACRN
Anne Sliney is the President of the Rhode Island Chapter of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care and is the Chief Nursing Officer for the Clinton Health Access Initiative, helping nurses and health officials in resource-poor countries fight human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Much of her work has focused on the expanding role of nurses in providing comprehensive HIV care and treatment in resource-constrained countries and addressing the nursing shortage throughout these same countries.   Ms Sliney previously designed and implemented a community based adherence program in RI, providing support to patients receiving treatment for their HIV infection.

Michael Stein, MD
Dr. Stein is Professor of Medicine and Community Health at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. His research interests include HIV prevention focused on sexual risk-taking, and combined pharmacological and behavioral interventions for substance users.  Dr. Stein is a recipient of a NIDA Mid-Career Mentorship Award (K24) and has been Principal Investigator of ten NIH-funded clinical trials involving substance-abusing populations over the past decade.

Patricia V. Symonds, PhD
Patricia Symonds joined Brown in 1992 as a Visiting Professor of Anthropology. She is now Adjunct Associate Professor with an areal interest in Southeast Asia and a specialty in minority hill dwellers in Thailand. Her research with the Hmong refugee population in the United States led to further work with that population in the far north of Thailand and Laos. Symonds is a medical anthropologist and she has conducted research on HIV/AIDS in Thailand to discover how culture, political economy, and cosmology can effect populations exposed to this epidemic. A Brown alumna (A.B., 1979: Ph.D., 1991), Symonds has taught in the Anthropology Department since 1992. She continues research both on the Hmong diaspora to the United States and the Hmong population in Thailand. Issues of Globalization and subsequent changes in life style are of particular interest. Her book “Calling in the Soul: Gender and the Cycle of Life in a Hmong Village” was a finalist for the Benda Prize in 2005.

Lynn E. Taylor, MD, AAHIVS
Lynn E. Taylor MD, is an HIV specialist focusing on HIV and viral hepatitis coinfection. She developed and directs Miriam Hospital's HIV/HCV Coinfection Program, which provides multidisciplinary care to HIV/HCV and HIV/HBV coinfected persons. After graduating from Harvard, Dr. Taylor completed medical school at The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and Internship and Residency in General Internal Medicine at Brown University/Rhode Island Hospital. She completed an NIH/National Institute of Drug Abuse Research Fellowship (T32) at The Miriam Hospital/Brown University School of Medicine entitled, "HIV and Other Infectious Consequences of Substance Abuse." This Research Fellowship training grant focused upon cross-disciplinary research on prevention, diagnosis and treatment of HIV and hepatitis B and C among substance users. Dr. Taylor developed and directs, "Make it HAPPEN in Rhode Island: Hepatitis Awareness, Prevention, Policy and Education Network." This program establishes Rhode Island's first free hepatitis C testing, counseling, referral and hepatitis A/B vaccination sites.

Nickolas Zaller, PhD
Nickolas Zaller PhD is an Assistant Professor (Research) and his current research interests include: the overlap of infectious diseases, illicit substance use, and incarceration; social and behavioral interventions for substance use; epidemiology of HIV and viral hepatitis infection; health disparities and structural determinants in accessing substance use and mental health treatment services.