Tiara C. Willie

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.