CAPS I&I Town Hall presents: William Brown III, PhD, DrPH, MA - Mixed-Method Evaluation of Social Media-Based Tools and Traditional Strategies to Recruit High-Risk and Hard-to-Reach Populations into an HIV Prevention Intervention Study

Men who have sex with men and transgender women are hard-to-reach populations for research. Social media-based tools may overcome certain barriers in accessing these groups and are being tested in an ongoing study exploring HIV home-test kit use to reduce risk behavior. We analyzed pre-screening responses about how volunteers learned about the study (n = 896) and demographic data from eligible participants who came for an initial study visit (n = 216) to determine the strengths and weaknesses of recruitment strategies.

William Brown, III is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, at UCSF. He holds a PhD in biomedical informatics, a DrPH, and an MA in human sexuality. He specializes in clinical research informatics, CBPR, disease prevention, intervention, and sexual health promotion with African Americans, Latinos, MSM, and youth. At Columbia University he developed an mHealth system to measure the use of rapid home HIV tests and translated that technology to collect real-time data and improve treatment adherence in an international multilingual HIV PrEP study. He has also developed infographics and data visualizations for digital patient-centered health information interventions; a new data integration assessment method called "SMASH" which provides String-metric Assisted Assessment of Semantic Harmonization; and an HIV semantic harmonization and data integration tool called "HERO" (the HIV-associated Entities in Research Ontology), which he used to integrate HIV data for advanced exploration and analysis. He was first to evaluate the new Health IT Usability Evaluation Model (Health-ITUEM) for mHealth technology. Similarly, at UC Berkeley, he developed the "Duo-social ecological model", which models public health in a growing internet-based social ecology, and he used the model to evaluate an online sexual partner HIV notification tool for youth. Lastly, Dr. Brown is a big advocate for interdisciplinary research and interdepartmental collaborations.