Cohort 2 RETI Fellows
Fellow Biographies
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Mentored Research Project Abstracts
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Associate Professor
Department of Social and Public Health
Ohio University
Background: Dr. Tania Basta received a B.S. in Kinesiology and a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Community Health Education from Indiana University and a Ph.D. in Health Promotion and Behavior from the University of Georgia. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Public Health in the College of Health Sciences and Professions at Ohio University and is also affiliated faculty in the Center for International Studies and the College of Communications. She is also the Associate Director of the Appalachian Rural Health Institute, an interdisciplinary health services and research institute, collaboratively run by the Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences and Professions at Ohio University. Dr. Basta has over 13 years of combined public health research and professional experience. She started her public health career as a worksite health practitioner, but in the past 10 year has worked extensively with domestic community-based organizations focused on HIV/AIDS. She is currently the Chair of the HIV/AIDS Section of the American Public Health Association. Dr. Basta’s research interests focus on increasing the quality of life among individuals living with HIV/AIDS. The majority of her publications are focused on the mental health status of low-income individuals living with HIV/AIDS in the United States. Now that she lives rural Appalachian Ohio, she has become interested in HIV prevention and treatment among individuals living in Appalachia. Recently, she was funded by the NIH Loan Repayment Plan to conduct rural Appalachian HIV research (2010-2012). Dr. Basta also has considerable experience with community-based participatory research (CBPR) and is a Co-Investigator on a Department of Energy Public Outreach Project that was funded to use CBPR methods to develop alternative uses for the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Appalachian, Ohio.
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Lecturer
Department of Population Health and Disease Prevention
University of California, Irvine
Background: Dr. Brandon Brown is a lecturer in the UC Irvine Program in Public Health, where his efforts are spent in both education and research. He teaches several courses, including ethics and responsible conduct of research in public health, international epidemiology, and advances in global health. He also serves as the director of undergraduate education, chair of the curriculum committee, director of the global health infrastructure development program, and is a clinical research ethicist. Brandon received his MPH from UCLA and his PhD in International Health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Global Disease Epidemiology and Control program. His dissertation titled ‘HPV prevalence and risk factors among female sex workers (FSWs) in Peru’ has yielded four peer review publications, with another five articles in preparation. Dr. Brown completed Postdoctoral studies at UCLA in the Global HIV/AIDS Prevention Research program, and in the UCSD Global Public Health program. Brandon has worked on projects in Peru for over 7 years, and is currently Principal or Co-Investigator on 6 HIV focused or related studies in Peru and Mexico. These projects include vaccine acceptability, building clinic infrastructure, studies of comorbidity of HIV with HPV, examining behaviors related to HPV infection, estimating HPV prevalence in developing countries, conducting interventions for cervical cancer prevention, recruitment and retention of high risk groups in clinical trials, and studies of STIs affecting FSWs and MSM. Dr. Brown is very interested is the topic of international research ethics, and works closely with the University of Cayetano Heredia in Peru. He hopes to begin a program training international scholars in research ethics at UC Irvine. A topic of particular interest is undue inducement in clinical studies of HIV in developing countries with vulnerable populations.
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 Brenda Curtis, Ph.D.
Health Communication Research Scientist
Treatment Research Institute
Background: Dr. Brenda Curtis is currently a Health Communication Research Scientist at the Treatment Research Institute. She received her Masters of Science in Public Health from the University of Illinois and her Doctoral degree from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her principal research interests have been in the fields of Health Communication and Public Health. She is very interested in providing scientifically tailored health information that is evidence based. She attempts to translate research into programs that allow for the building of individual and community capacity. In her recent research, she developed a web-based smoking cessation intervention program and conducted a randomized controlled trial to assess the relative effectiveness of tailoring the intervention content to particular demographic (age, gender, ethnicity), and also functional behavioral attributes of the individuals in the target population. That is, the computer used particular presentations of the same message that were individually designed to attributes known to be important in gaining attention and shaping behavior. She found that this relatively simple and inexpensive procedure was able to improve intention to quit by over 19%. Dr. Curtis is continuing to explore this line of research and recently deployed a substance use screening and brief intervention web-based interactive program she developed into a New York school district. Dr. Curtis is also working on innovative ways to increase enrollment and retention of hard to reach populations into HIV clinical trials. Her research has led her to examine the ethical implications raised by the use of the Internet and social media to recruit and retain subjects into HIV related studies. She is particularly interested in assessing how Institutional Review Boards are implementing new policies and procedures to deal with online recruitment.
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 Shira Goldenberg, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Division of Global Public Health
University of California, San Diego
Background: Dr. Shira Goldenberg is a Spanish speaking global health investigator with seven years of experience conducting research on social and structural factors shaping HIV and sexually transmitted infection (STI) risk among vulnerable populations. After completing her MSc in Epidemiology at the University of British Columbia, she received a Canada-U.S. Fulbright award to pursue her PhD through the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and San Diego State University Joint Doctoral Program in Public Health (2008-2011). Dr. Goldenberg is currently a post-doctoral fellow in the UCSD Division of Global Public Health, where her work focuses on structural factors shaping HIV/STI risk, gender-based violence and sex trafficking among female sex workers along the Mexico-U.S. and Mexico-Guatemala borders. She has also worked with the Pan American Health Organization on issues related to mobility and HIV in Central America and Mexico. As data on social and structural factors, such as gender inequities, poverty, and laws/policies are necessary to better understand and prevent HIV/STI infection, Dr. Goldenberg’s short-term goal is to develop the methodological and ethical skills to investigate social and structural influences shaping HIV/STI infection among formerly trafficked women. Her long-term research plans are to develop and evaluate structural interventions to reduce the impacts of sex work among women at high risk of HIV infection in border settings, which is a pressing public health concern in the U.S., Latin America, and globally.
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Thomas Guadamuz, Ph.D., M.H.S.
Assistant Professor
Behavioral and Community Health Sciences
Graduate School of Public Health
University of Pittsburgh
Background: Dr. Thomas Guadamuz completed graduate training in infectious disease epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and later completed postdoctoral training in behavioral and social sciences and health at the University of Pittsburgh and Mahidol University in Thailand. He is currently a recipient of a Mentored Research Scientist Development Award from NIMH to develop a community-level behavioral change intervention for high-risk young men who have sex with men in Thailand. He is also working with transgender populations in Thailand and the Philippines to understand HIV risk contexts that will inform intervention development. Dr. Guadamuz has worked in partnership with numerous community-based organizations in the US and Asia and has collaborated with the U.S. CDC, the Thailand Ministry of Public Health, World Health Organization, International Labor Organization, and Family Health International. Dr. Guadamuz currently holds a joint appointment at the Center for Health Policy Studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Mahidol University where he has close research collaborations and teaches on gender, sexuality and health. His current research interests are the social determinants of health among marginalized populations, recruitment of hard-to-reach populations and HIV risk contexts in online and offline spaces, including gender- and sexuality-based violence and cyber bullying.
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.jpg) Charmaine Thokoane
Project Coordinator
Centre for the Study of AIDS
University of Pretoria
Background: Charmaine Thokoane is a project coordinator at the Centre for the Study of AIDS (CSA), University of Pretoria. Her current position entails coordinating the HIV/AIDS and Human Rights project of the AIDS and Human Rights Research Unit (AHRRU). This unit is a joint initiative between the Centre for the Study of AIDS and the Centre for Human Rights. Her duties include training, research, material development, fundraising, organising seminars and events. She has been involved in several research projects at the CSA in collaboration with national and international institutions and organisations, both on the University of Pretoria campus as well as in various communities within South Africa. In addition to this, she has worked with governmental and non-governmental institutions in South Africa, as well as, non-governmental organisations and academic institutions in the Eastern and Southern African region on Human Rights and, Sexual and Reproductive Health. She has represented the CSA in various forums in South African and other African countries. Her areas of interest in Public Health and Human Rights developed after joining the CSA as a volunteer in 2005, while studying towards a degree in natural and agricultural sciences. In 2010, she was selected by the US Embassy, to be part of the US State Departments’ International Visitor Leadership Programme on Skills and Youth Development (February 2011). The knowledge and skills she gained through this experience, has helped shape the community work she does in her current project with the AHRRU.
Charmaine Thokoane is participating in the RETI summer training program through funding by the Fordham Center for Ethics Education / Santander Universities International Scholarship
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Associate Research Scientist
Yale Law School / Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS
Yale University
Background: Dr. Kristen Underhill holds a D.Phil. in Evidence-Based Social Intervention from Oxford University, where she focused on behavioral HIV prevention, systematic reviewing, and research with vulnerable populations. She completed her postdoctoral training under an NIH T32 grant in the Department of Community Health at Brown University, where she focused on the behavioral implications of biomedical HIV prevention strategies. Dr. Underhill's published articles have included studies of abstinence-based HIV prevention approaches, HIV risk among transgender women and their male partners, and the implementation of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). She also holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, and her legal research focuses on law and public health, the use of behavioral science concepts in the law, and healthcare financing. She is jointly affiliated with the Yale Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS and Yale Law School. Dr. Underhill is currently PI of a K01 Mentored Research Scientist Development grant focusing on behavioral issues involved in the use of oral antiretroviral PrEP by men who have sex with men (MSM). This research grant uses mixed methods to investigate willingness to use PrEP, attitudes towards risk compensation behavior, and perceptions of drug efficacy. Dr. Underhill's legal research aligns with her public health research interests; one of her recent legal projects examined legal doctrines and regulations applying to health insurance coverage of biomedical HIV prevention technologies.
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