For Immediate Release

September 28, 2007

CUSSW Professor to Examine Factors that Influence Community-Academic
Collaborative Partnerships in HIV Prevention Research

New York, NY – Dr. Rogério M. Pinto, Assistant Professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, has received a 5-year, Research Development Award (K01) from the National Institute of Mental Health. Entitled "Promoting Community Collaboration in HIV Research," this award will be used for a study to examine the factors that influence HIV-related service providers in New York City to form research partnerships and to collaborate with HIV prevention researchers. Dr. Pinto will refine and test a model of collaboration that will inform and promote partnerships in HIV prevention research in at risk communities.

While the science of HIV prevention has generated effective HIV prevention interventions and translated them into user-friendly programs, many Community Based Organizations (CBOs) remain hesitant to provide them to clients. Prevention providers have difficulty accessing information and transferring interventions from experimental to community settings, primarily due to time, funding, and expertise-related constraints. As a result, many at risk individuals may receive less effective interventions. In order to diffuse such programs in communities at risk, researchers need to understand better what makes service providers more or less inclined to adopt HIV prevention programs and to offer them to consumers. Researcher partnerships with CBOs are thus essential if community members – consumers of social and medical services in CBOs across the country – are to benefit from HIV prevention approaches.

“To ensure community acceptability of HIV prevention research – including dissemination, translation, adaptation, and adoption of interventions – researchers and policy makers need to engage in all phases of research with providers who actually deliver HIV prevention interventions. It is not enough, and it may be unproductive, to engage service providers only at the point of adoption,” says Dr. Pinto. “By identifying important factors that influence provider collaboration in HIV prevention research, we will better be able to develop models of collaborative research and to draw relationships between factors that influence collaboration. This will lead to strategies for collaborative research that can be successfully replicated internationally.”

For more information or to interview Dr. Pinto, please contact Jeannie Hii at 212-851-2327 or [email protected].

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About CUSSW (www.socialwork.columbia.edu)
For more than 100 years, the Columbia University School of Social Work has been the leader in practice and policy. Located in New York City, the School offers Master’s and Doctoral programs which are nationally and internationally recognized for their excellence. With its signature curriculum that encompasses multifaceted academic coursework and a far-reaching field education experience, CUSSW continues to be at the forefront of clinical practice, public policy, teaching, research and social work innovation in the 21st century.

About Rogério M. Pinto
Professor Pinto is a Brazilian-American psychiatric social worker with extensive clinical and community work with racial and ethnic minority populations in the United States. He is a professor of social work practice at Columbia University School of Social Work and specializes in community-based participatory research as a form of social intervention. He has a doctoral degree in social work from Columbia University and a postdoctoral research fellowship from the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. Professor Pinto has numerous peer reviewed publications, including several that focus on community-based health research. He has done most of his teaching and research in the United States and has been expanding this work in collaboration with social science researchers in Brazil.