Meet our Team

Trace Kershaw, PhD, focuses on the social and structural determinants of health (e.g., sexual health, substance use, mental health, reproductive health) among adolescents and emerging adults. His current focus is using innovative technologic methods to understand how social (e.g., how ones friends, partners, and family) and geographic context (e.g., how the places one goes and lives) influences their behaviors and health. Further, he is an expert in developing interventions aimed to improve the health and well being of adolescents and emerging adults.He is the Chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Director of two HIV Training Grants (Yale AIDS Prevention Training, Research Education Institute for Diverse Scholars), and Director of the  the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA). He has twice won Mentor of the Year. He also serves on expert panels for the NIH and CDC and on several journal editorial boards.

Frances is a postdoctoral fellow in the NIDA T32 program through the Division of Prevention and Community Research in the Department of Psychiatry. She earned a PhD in clinical (community) psychology from Bowling Green State University and is a registered board-certified art therapist. Frances’ research and clinical-community interventions focus on increasing health equity for people in recovery with intersecting marginalized identities. Branches of her research focus on the development and evaluation of 1) peer-led programs in healthcare organizational settings, 2) individual- and systems-level interventions to reduce stigma and structural discrimination towards people in recovery, and 3) scalable, digital or arts-based interventions for health promotion and prevention of mental health and substance use challenges.

Erin is the Administrative Program Director with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA) and the Project Manager with the ENRICH Team.

I am Bryce Puesta Takenaka, a queer, second-generation Filipino and Japanese writer, PhD student in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health, and a T32 Research Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. Moving through an occupied Hawai'i formed my research interests in grappling with the afterlives of settler colonialism, imperialism, racial capitalism, U.S. militarism, tourism, urbanism, and environmental justice on queer and transgender health. I am constantly drawn to questions and debates that contend how Black and Pasifika Indigenous queer and transgender geographies are created, represented, occupied, shared, transformed, and imagined as they coalesce with movements toward anti-racist, anti-colonial, de-militarized, and abolitionist futures. I lean into transnational epistemologies to inform participatory and radical spatial practices to illuminate how racial violence recalibrates through the built environment, which has progressed into skewed health inequities. I earned a Master of Arts (MA) in History of Science and Medicine from Yale University, a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Epidemiology from the College for Public Health and Social Justice at Saint Louis University and a Bachelor of Science in Public Health from Lindenwood University.