Training

STD/AIDS Research Training Fellowship Program

Sociobehavioral STD/AIDS Research Track

Martina Morris, PhD. and Sevgi Aral PhD, Co-Directors

Overview: The behavioral sciences training program for STD and AIDS research attract post doctoral behavioral scientists specializing in STD research, predoctoral behavioral science students who intend to focus on behavioral aspects of STD; and non-behavioral science trainees who wish to complement their basic science or biomedical training with focused training in selective areas of social, behavioral and prevention research. During the past cycle, trainees came from diverse backgrounds, including pre-doctoral students with MPH and MSW degrees and post-doctoral students with training in anthropology, epidemiology, and medicine. An interdisciplinary approach has become increasingly necessary as the field of STD/AIDS research has evolved towards enhanced understanding of population transmission dynamics and the role of sexual and social networks in infection spread. This has encouraged more rigorous methodological approaches to behavioral and health services intervention research, with greater attention to the interaction between individual, relational and community level factors, and to measurement.

This Track seeks to prepare the next generation of sociobehavioral investigators to participate in this multi-disciplinary environment. This training will prepare fellows to conduct scientifically rigorous quantitative and qualitative research on the social and behavioral determinants of biomedical outcomes. It will prepare them to develop high quality behavioral measures and analytic techniques, and to plan and implement the necessary individual and community randomized trials to assess the efficacy of behavioral and health services interventions.

Didactic Curriculum and Additional Seminar Training and Mentoring for Pre-doctoral and Post-doctoral Trainees: All trainees participate in the STD and AIDS Core Curriculum. In addition, all trainees take didactic coursework in areas pertinent to their planned research (i.e., health services, environmental health, psychology, sociology, statistics and biostatistics, social work or public affairs). For predoctoral trainees, such courses are typically integrated into the degree program (MPH or PhD) of their home department. Individuals pursuing the MPH degree, for example, could enter the Social and Behavioral Sciences program in the School of Public Health, and would take courses from the following list: Community Approaches to Health Promotion; Health Economics; Theoretical Perspectives on Health Behavior Change, Health and Society; Environmental Risk and Society, Health and Mental Health Policy, and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Prevention Science. For trainees interested in social networks and mathematical modeling, a number of courses are now being taught through the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, and the Sociology and Anthropology Departments. Current postdoctoral training fellows Goodreau and Jones have taken these.

Pre- and post-doctoral trainees are also encouraged to participate in the many research seminars, journal clubs and working groups on campus that focus on HIV/STD, sociobehavioral research, and statistical methods. Regular seminars of particular interest are conducted in the Center for Demography and Ecology and the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences, the Prevention Research Center and the Social Development Research Group in the School of Social Work, and the new CFAR Sociobehavioral and Prevention Research Core seminar series described in section 8.B.1. In addition, several research working groups welcome training fellow participation. Examples include the network modeling group, the population genetics group, and the CFAR A-CASI working group. These groups offer high-level interdisciplinary collaborative experiences at the leading edge of their fields.

Faculty: 26 faculty members participate in the Sociobehavioral Track, including 8 training faculty. Faculty resources for this Track have both grown and become more cohesive during the past five years. There is now a stronger tie to the social science departments in the UW School of Arts and Sciences, a group of faculty with interests in networks and the mathematical modeling of HIV/STD transmission, and an intellectual community built around the new Sociobehavioral and Prevention Research core of the UW CFAR. During the next 5 years, we expect to put this Track on a par with the other Tracks in our program.

Research Training Opportunities: Research opportunities for trainees in the Sociobehavioral track are characterized by involvement in research projects with strongly multidisciplinary designs. A short synopsis describing the research of the 6 senior and 2 new training faculty is provided below, but trainees are often involved in projects headed by faculty from other tracks.

• Aral, Sevgi O. Ph.D., Associate Director for Science, Division of STD Prevention, CDC, a UW Affiliate Professor of Medicine works with Dr. Holmes on: 1) identification of STD-related disease priorities in developing countries and assessment of sustainable intervention packages; 2) assessment of global patterns of sex work as determined by social, cultural, economic, and political determinants; their differential contribution to STI spread and the identification of pattern-specific interventions aimed at limiting the role of sex work in STI spread; 3) assessment of changes in the sexual behaviors of the US population over the past decade and assessment of similarities and differences in the sexual behaviors of the general population and those of STD clinic clientele; 4) comparison of sexual behavior changes observed in the United States with those observed in the UK, employing data from the Seattle General Population Surveys I and II and the UK NATSAL I and II surveys; 5) comparison of adolescent/young adult sexual behaviors and local networks among a national representative sample in the AddHealth study, vs samples of similar ages attending STD clinics in 3 US cities; and 6) the exploration of sexual trajectory types and their relationship to STD risk employing a social contextual life course approach.
  
  
• Morris, Martina PhD, Director of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the UW, and Blumstein-Jordan Professor in Sociology and Statistics, has made important contributions to network models for HIV/AIDS transmission and is co-author of a recent prize-winning book on trends in economic inequality in the US. Her current projects include statistical models for partnership networks, sampling issues in network study design, adolescent STI and HIV research, and cross-national comparative studies of HIV-related partnership networks. She is also a core member of the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences and will be the first director of the new Sociobehavioral and Prevention Research Core for the UW CFAR. While new to the training faculty, Dr. Morris has mentored trainees James Jones and Steven Goodreau on several AIDS related projects during the past two years.
  
  
• Donovan, Dennis PhD. Over the past 17 years Dr. Donovan has been affiliated with the Addictions Treatment Center at the Seattle Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and was instrumental in the development of, and served as the Associate Director of, the first Center of Excellence in Substance Abuse Treatment and Education (CESATE) within the Department of Veterans Affairs nationally. He currently serves as the Director of the University of Washington's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute.
  
  
• Morrison, Diane PhD. Associate Dean for Research of the UW School of Social Work, Dr. Morrision is a social psychologist whose work is primarily on reproductive and sexual behaviors. Her research is based on social cognitive models including the Theory of Reasoned Action, the Theory of Planned Behavior and Social Cognitive Theory. She is involved in theory development and testing; application of these models to reproductive decision making, sexual safety, and other health-related behaviors; and development and testing of interventions. Dr. Morrison's current work focuses on adding interpersonal and environmental constructs to these psychological models.
  
  
• Ryan, Rosemary PhD. A Research Associate Professor in the School of Social Work, Dr. Ryan focuses on HIV/AIDS prevention and care services, including a new NIMH-funded trial of a risk reduction intervention in high risk, HIV positive men.
  
  
• Simoni, Jane PhD. Dr. Simoni's primary interests are in Health and Community Psychology in underrepresented populations. She is an authority on the social and psychological adaptation of persons living with HIV/AIDS. Her research focuses on the disclosure of HIV infection, on adherence to HAART, and on drug use, and depressive symptomatology. Dr. Simoni is new to the training faculty.
  
  
• Stovel, Katherine PhD. Dr. Stovel's major research interests are in the areas of economic sociology and adolescent sexuality. She helped to develop and implement the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Her primary research interests are in network analysis and sequence models for behavioral development, and she and Dr. Holmes work with trainee Taraneh Shafii on research on determinants of condom use in the national sample of adolescents.

  Additional Opportunities Unique to this Track: In addition to fellowships and postdoctoral training opportunities available to other trainees in the field of HIV and STD prevention, trainees in this Track are likely to be eligible for advanced fellowships and research funding offered by organizations that support social science and demography. This would include the Population Council, which supports predoctoral, postdoctoral or midcareer training in reproductive health for researchers who focus on developing countries; the Social Science Research Council, which provides pre- and postdoctoral support for social and behavioral research on sexuality for researchers who focus on the US; and the US Census Bureau Postdoctoral research fellowship program. Trainees whose interests are in the mathematical modeling of HIV/STD transmission may apply for the Santa Fe Institute Complex Systems Summer School.