Collaborators

Frederick (Rick) L. Altice, MD, MA, is a physician-scientist and Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University, where he serves as Director of the Yale Center for Clinical and Community Research. He is an internationally recognized leader in implementation science, health service integration, global health, and health equity, with a career focused on translating evidence-based interventions into real-world practice for populations disproportionately affected by infectious diseases and substance use disorders. In parallel with his research leadership, he remains an active clinician in both infectious diseases and addiction medicine, ensuring that his work is continuously informed by the realities of patient care and health system delivery. Dr. Altice’s work is centered on implementation science at the intersection of HIV, hepatitis C, tuberculosis, and opioid use disorder, particularly among populations facing structural vulnerabilities. His research has focused extensively on people who inject drugs, but also includes men who have sex with men, transgender women, female sex workers, individuals involved in the criminal legal system, and populations affected by displacement and conflict. Across these groups, his work addresses disparities in access to prevention and treatment, including HIV prevention (PrEP), antiretroviral therapy, treatment for hepatitis C and tuberculosis, and medications for opioid use disorder. A defining feature of Dr. Altice’s work is his leadership in integrating health services that are traditionally delivered in silos. He has developed and evaluated models that bring together infectious diseases treatment, addiction care, mental health services, primary care and social support into coordinated, patient-centered systems. These models extend across clinical and community settings, including primary care clinics, hospitals, syringe services programs, correctional facilities, and transitional programs that support individuals returning to the community after incarceration. His work is grounded in the principle that effective care must address the full spectrum of medical, behavioral, and social needs faced by patients. Dr. Altice has led a sustained and highly influential research program spanning epidemiology, intervention development, decision science and implementation science. His work has evolved from identifying multilevel determinants of poor treatment engagement and outcomes to designing, testing, and scaling evidence-based interventions in real-world settings. He has led large, multi-site implementation trials across diverse contexts, evaluating strategies to improve uptake, retention, and effectiveness of care. His research applies leading implementation science frameworks, including EPIS, PRISM, RE-AIM, iPARiHS, and CFIR, to guide the systematic introduction, adaptation, and scale-up of interventions while maintaining a focus on sustainability and health system integration. A central and increasingly prominent focus of Dr. Altice’s work is the role of stigma as a critical barrier to care. He has advanced the use of behavioral design and decision science principles to understand and reduce stigma at multiple levels, including patients, providers, and health systems. By applying concepts from behavioral economics and human-centered design, his work seeks to reshape how care is offered, framed, and experienced, making engagement in care easier, more acceptable, and more aligned with patient preferences. These approaches have been implemented across diverse populations and settings, including HIV prevention among MSM and transgender women, care for people who use drugs, and service delivery in criminal justice and global health contexts. Dr. Altice has also led the development and evaluation of digital health and mobile health (mHealth) interventions designed to support implementation at scale. His work includes mobile applications, electronic health record-integrated clinical decision support tools, and AI-enabled platforms, including chatbots and adaptive interventions, that extend care beyond traditional clinical encounters. These tools are designed to support real-time decision-making for both patients and providers, improve engagement and retention in care, and facilitate the delivery of evidence-based interventions in diverse settings. A key component of this work is embedding shared decision-making into digital platforms, enabling care that is more responsive to patient preferences while remaining scalable across health systems. Over more than two decades, Dr. Altice has led implementation science and health systems research globally, with major programs in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the U.S. His work has focused on strengthening health systems, advancing equitable access to integrated care, and building sustainable research and training infrastructure. He has led or collaborated on projects funded by the National Institutes of Health, CDC, SAMHSA, and HRSA, and has partnered with international organizations including the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, USAID, PEPFAR, and UNODC to inform policy and large-scale implementation. He directs multiple international implementation science research and training programs, including long-standing collaborations with partners in Malaysia, Peru, Georgia and Ukraine, and plays a central role in training the next generation of implementation scientists. Through these efforts, he has contributed to building global capacity in implementation science, health service integration, and stigma-informed care through Fogarty-funded international training programs. Across his work, Dr. Altice has consistently focused on bridging the gap between evidence and practice through integrated, patient-centered models of care. His leadership is defined by a commitment to advancing implementation science, reducing stigma, improving health system performance, and developing scalable solutions that improve outcomes and reduce disparities for vulnerable populations in the United States and globally. Dr. Altice is a physician-scientist whose work focuses on how to deliver the right care to the right patients by redesigning health systems, reducing stigma, and integrating services at scale.

Dr. Azbel is a public health sociologist exploring how medical interventions translate into new settings. They use qualitative methods to unpack the social relations of treatment where drug use and infectious diseases intersect, especially among queer people and people in prison. Their work tackles some of the most stubborn impasses to implementing harm reduction interventions in Latin America, South Asia, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia by generating a space where new forms of treatment are possible.

Since 2006, I have served as Chief Executive Officer of the APT Foundation, a non-profit agency founded in 1970 by members of the Yale University Department of Psychiatry to promote health and recovery for those who live with substance use disorders and/or mental illness. My professional interests focus on identifying treatment gaps in substance abuse/mental health treatment and improving access to those services including services for persons who are incarcerated or recently released from jail or prison. My academic interests and pursuits include large- and small-scale implementation projects that are focused on access to and quality in mental health care and substance abuse treatment services including integration with primary care, and integration of treatment for infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and HCV. My role in these project teams is often as both coach and researcher.  I currently hold a position as an assistant professor in the Yale School of Medicine AIDS program and as a faculty member in addiction medicine.

I am a Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology, and Director of the Yale antivirals and Vaccines research program (formerly HIV Clinical Trials program) of the Yale AIDS Program, Section of Infectious Diseases of the Yale School of Medicine. My clinical responsibilities include educating and training medical students, residents and infectious diseases fellows in various capacities in inpatient and outpatient settings; and through structured course work and other teaching sessions. As a faculty of the HIV training track of the Yale-Internal Medicine primary care program and as a faculty of the Human Resources for Health program in Rwanda (2013 to 2019), I have extensive experience with curriculum development, structuring of residency training programs, and mentoring residents and faculty. In Rwanda specifically, I have and still continue to mentor medical residents and junior faculty in quality improvement and clinical research projects that are locally relevant and addressing important infectious diseases-related problems (particularly HIV/AIDS epidemic and antimicrobial resistance). Furthermore, I have facilitated meaningful educational and research collaborations between faculty and trainees across institutions. As the program director of World Bank and HRSA-funded efforts supporting the Liberia College of Physicians and surgeons (LCPS)–run Internal medicine residency training program, I have overseen the selection and deployment of faculty to Liberia, and am responsible for educational programs and activities aimed at strengthening the residency training program. Through an award from National Academy of Sciences / USAID, I have trained Liberia's first-ever Infectious Diseases physician who achieved fellowship of the West African College of Physicians in that specialty in 2022.I have an ongoing D71 award (2025-2027) from the Fogarty International Center to advance HIV research training and capacity in Liberia .Overall, my expertise and collective experiences to date have positioned me to design and run successful projects around capacity building in low-resource settings including developing and implementing innovative and robust medical training and research programs for faculty, fellows, residents and students. Since 2017, I have been the Director of the Yale AIDS Program HIV clinical trials program, and a principal investigator on numerous pharmacokinetic, phase 2 and 3 safety and efficacy trials of novel antiviral compounds (HIV, SARS CoV-2). I am also a lead investigator on the international DISCOVER trial evaluating TAF/FTC vs TDF/FTC for HIV prevention among MSM and transgender women as well as PURPOSE-2 trial evaluating long acting lenacapavir for PrEP among MSM, transmasculinizing and transfeminizing individuals as well as gender non binary individuals who have sex with men. I am also funded by NIAID (2023-25) for work advancing HIV PrEP for adolescent girls and young women in Liberia. In response to the COVID pandemic, I have been Yale principal investigator on multiple investigational therapeutic and preventative clinical trials for COVID-19 including remdesivir (now FDA approved), leronlimab and remdesivir and tocilizumab combination therapy as well as the Pfizer/BioNTech and GSK/Sanofi COVID-19 Vaccine trials. IN addition, I am also the PI on multiple ongoing trials evaluating mRNA vaccines for other infectious diseases and vaccines for bacterial infection.

Dr. Sullivan's research program focuses on both individual and system-level factors that influence the well-being of women who experience intimate partner violence (IPV). Her naturalistic studies employ micro-longitudinal designs to explore how daily experiences and behaviors unfold in natural environments. Her interventional studies promote relationship health, resilience and recovery from trauma and substance use. Integral to her approach is community-partnered research, which centers women who have experienced IPV and the practitioners who support them. At the individual level, Dr. Sullivan's research advances understanding of factors that foster resilience, such as self-efficacy, empowerment, and hope, as well as factors that heighten the risk for negative outcomes, including posttraumatic stress, substance use, and sexual risk behaviors. She studies the impact of substance use, criminal justice, and other service system’s responses on women’s emotional and physical wellbeing, including the ways in which it promotes or impedes their safety, recovery and resilience. Dr. Sullivan’s development of community-based and service-system interventions includes a peer-led support group, a single-session intervention to promote hope, and a stepped-care behavioral health intervention aimed at reducing trauma symptoms to enhance retention in opioid use disorder care. She disseminates findings to researchers, practitioners, and the public through various formats, including practitioner briefs, blogs, infographics, webinars, and popular media, to accelerate the translation of research into changes in practice and policy. She is a licensed psychologist with experience across a range of treatment settings, from inpatient and outpatient programs for mental health and substance use disorders to community programs for women who experience IPV and court-mandated interventions for offenders.

Tiara C. Willie is a predoctoral fellow in CIRA's NIMH Interdisciplinary HIV Prevention Training Program and is currently working on her Ph.D. in Chronic Disease Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. She earned her B.S. in Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her M.A. in Women's Studies at Southern Connecticut State University and. Her master's thesis, My Existence is My Activism: Evaluating the Self-Manifestation of Strength amongst Women Experiencing Intimate Partner Violence, used empowerment theory to examine women's perceived strength and locus of control among community women experiencing intimate partner violence. Her research focuses on building knowledge on gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS from an intersectionality framework. Her nascent program of research explores the implications of individual, relationship, community, and structural-level determinants of gender-based violence on the sexual and reproductive health of marginalized women, domestically and globally. This empirically informed research would be used to construct HIV prevention interventions. Her mentors are Dr. Trace Kershaw and Dr. Jhumka Gupta. Tiara worked as a Research Assistant at the Yale School of Medicine from 2012-2014. In her position, she supported federally funded projects designed to examine individual-level and structural-level factors that impact the health of women experiencing intimate partner violence including sexual risk, HIV vulnerability, and depression. Prior to moving to New Haven, she lived in North Carolina where she was involved in community-based research in the HIV/AIDS service community.