Today at Brown

“Oxford was a happy accident,” Don Operario says of his previous employer — the oldest university in the Western world, 668 years older than Brown.

“I saw a job ad, applied and got the job,” he says. “I wasn’t looking for a job, but I found myself in England.”

Operario was drawn to Oxford by its development of a school of public health, he says. “They were also building a program about social intervention using scientific evidence.”

The Los Angeles native has a background in social psychology. “My first interest was the impact of discrimination and prejudice on health and well-being,” says Operario, who then applied that lens to HIV.

“[Oxford] really opened for me and piqued an interest in the international, global scale [of HIV],” he says. “In the U.K., the epidemic isn’t as present” — so research is conducted in such places as Africa and Eastern Europe.

“I’m glad to be back in the American context — I can continue studying internationally but can study the population I grew up being interested in.”

Operario, who is Filipino American, has published research on males and females, transgender males and females, Asian/Pacific Islanders and South Africans, among others. He has a paper in press and ongoing research on African American males and HIV, a topic he calls “quite underserviced and understudied.”

He also plans to expand previous research on South African children orphaned by AIDS: “They have a higher risk of HIV and psychological issues and are less likely to complete school or enroll in school than children with parents who are alive and children whose parents died of other causes.”

In September, Operario and his U.K. and South African colleagues will begin studying children whose parents are alive but afflicted with AIDS-related illness. “We have reason to believe that the psychological and health problems we’ve observed among children orphaned by AIDS actually begin prior to the experience of parental death, when their parents are still alive,” he says. “We will be studying the impact on children of parental health decline, stigma due to living in a household affected by AIDS, and having to care for sick parents.”

Operario also plans to continue his involvement in the Cochrane Collaboration, an international community of public health and medical researchers who advocate the use of rigorous scientific evidence to inform decisions about health policy and practice. “Surprisingly, a lot of public health policies and medical practices are not based on research evidence, but are instead based on ideology, tradition, or ‘expert opinion,’ whatever that is,” he says.

Cochrane researchers summarize and communicate to policy-makers evidence from the most rigorously conducted studies, he says. “With my Ph.D. student Kristen Underhill, I have conducted a Cochrane review which showed there is no evidence that ‘abstinence-only’ programs are effective at preventing HIV. This review was picked up and cited in policy discussions, helping to support changes in national and international HIV prevention policies.”