Wendee Wechsberg, PhD
Director, Substance Abuse Treatment Evaluations & Interventions (SATEI)
Research program at RTI

This presentation will review several international NIH studies and also present a newly funded combination prevention study that will include the next generation of research with sex workers and vulnerable women for biobehavioral outcomes and ART adherence.

Dr. Wendee M. Wechsberg is Senior Director of the Substance Abuse Treatment Evaluations and Interventions Research Program at RTI International. She is also Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Gillings School of Global Public Health, Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine, and Adjunct Professor of Psychology in the Public Interest at North Carolina State University (NCSU). Dr. Wechsberg started her career in 1977 as an addiction clinician and later as a treatment director. Since 1994 she has devoted her career to applied research using both quantitative and qualitative methods to develop and test the efficacy of HIV prevention interventions among diverse populations of substance abusers. Her Woman-Focused HIV Prevention Intervention, known as the Women’s CoOp, funded by NIDA for more than 10 years, is one of CDC’s best-evidence HIV behavioral prevention interventions. It has been adapted specifically for underserved and vulnerable adult and adolescent women in North Carolina, and in multiple regions in South Africa and in Russia. One South African adaptation is listed in the USAID Gender and HIV Compendium for African projects as “promising practices.” It has recently been packaged and is currently being scaled up in one region of South Africa. Dr. Wechsberg is currently funded by NIDA, NIAAA, NICHD, and CDC. In 2008, she was ranked third among all NIH-funded researchers who received HIV/AIDS investigator-initiated grants (Science, 321[5880], 520–521). Dr. Wechsberg has published in the areas of gender and ethnicity,

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