NJ ACTS Special Populations Seminar with Shawnika Hull, PhD

“Feasibility & Acceptability of Sistas Informing Sistas About Topics on AIDS and PrEP (SISTA-P)”

Shawnika Hull, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Dr. Hull will describe the community-engaged development and testing of SISTA-P, a Black women-specific HIV prevention intervention that is grounded in Social Cognitive Theory and Intersectionality. SISTA-P focuses on self-care activities for Black women to increase their knowledge of and recognition of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) use as self-care, and increase their PrEP uptake.  SISTA-P also trains women to increase their efficacy and skills for overcoming social-structural barriers to PrEP uptake.

Bio: Shawnika Hull (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research focuses on reducing racial inequities in HIV incidence through community-engaged, applied communication science. She develops, implements, and evaluates theoretically grounded communication interventions focused on impacting and overcoming individual and social-structural barriers to HIV prevention. This research is informed by and developed in close collaboration with community partners. Her expertise includes qualitative (i.e. focus groups) and quantitative (i.e. surveys, experiments) data collection and analytical methods. Her research has been funded through various institutional, non-profit (i.e., MAC AIDS Fund) and governmental mechanisms (i.e., NIH, CDC) and published in communication and public health journals. Her rigorous, theoretically grounded, collaborative approach to research informs health communication theorizing and practice.