Brian Pence

Dr. Pence is a behavioral, psychiatric and infectious diseases epidemiologist. His research spans three inter-related areas: global mental health, including scaling up mental health treatment interventions for vulnerable populations; the intersection of mental illness with other health crises included the HIV and opioid epidemics; and suicide prevention research. His work integrates intervention research, implementation science, advanced epidemiologic methods for observational data, and research leveraging large administrative data sources. Examples of current or recently funded projects include SHARP (the Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Partnership for Mental Health Capacity-Building, an NIMH U19 implementation science project focused on integrating depression treatment into general medical care in Malawi); TRACE (Tailored Response to Address Psychiatric Comorbidity and HIV Care Engagement, an NIMH R34 project to pilot-test a mental health intervention for people living with HIV in the southern US); INSPIRE (Innovations in Suicide Prevention Research, an NIMH R01 to establish a suicide surveillance system in North Carolina and use it to identify intervention points for suicide prevention); and a NIDA R21 (acronym needed!) to examine the relationship of different long-term opioid prescribing patterns with opioid-related (overdose) and infectious disease (HIV, HCV, syphilis) outcomes. He is also the director of a NIAID T32 pre- and postdoctoral training program in infectious diseases epidemiology and associate director for research of a NIMH D43 training program in mental health research for Malawian scientists. He is Professor of Epidemiology, Associate Director of the Division of Global Mental Health in the department of Psychiatry, Member of the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, and Affiliate Faculty of the Injury Prevention Research Center at UNC.