Human Mobility and HIV Program

Overview

Mobility can disrupt health care, endanger the health of individuals, and thwart efforts to maintain health care services. People who are mobile move between locations temporarily, seasonally, or permanently for a range of voluntary and/or involuntary reasons. This includes, for example, people who are mobile due to household fluidity, economic opportunity, seasonal work, poverty, homelessness, human trafficking, and those displaced by geopolitical and/or natural events. Levels of mobility are currently high and anticipated to increase because of climate change. As such, there is a need for research that examines the impact of human mobility on prevention and treatment outcomes in key populations with greater likelihood of acquiring or living with HIV.

The purpose of this program is to support research that: 1) advances understanding of how human mobility affects engagement with the HIV prevention and care continuum and 2) identifies strategies to address these challenges. Research among mobile is populations is encouraged to develop, test, and implement interventions to improve HIV outcomes, and utilize socioecological process models to identify the impacts of lifespan, structural and individual-level factors on HIV outcomes. All research should be conducted with stakeholder input and consideration of the ethical, legal, and social challenges associated with studying HIV outbreaks among mobile populations.

Research Objectives

• Support epidemiological studies of HIV among mobile populations.
• Identify HIV prevention strategies for key mobile populations.
• Develop novel approaches to engaging mobile people living with HIV in the HIV care continuum.
• Determine the effects of mobility linked to climate change on HIV outcomes, both at the individual and population levels (please see https://www.nih.gov/sites/default/files/research-training/initiatives/climate-change/nih-climate-change-framework.pdf ).
• Examine mobility-linked social and structural determinants of health that affect HIV and mental health outcomes.

Contact

Anaïs Stenson
Clinical Neuroscience of HIV Program
Human Mobility and HIV Program
Developmental and Clinical Neuroscience of HIV Prevention and Treatment Branch
Division of AIDS Research, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
stensonaf@nih.gov
(240) 926-7572