My current projects focus on social inequalities in vaccination.

Young men who have sex with men (MSM) are at elevated risk for HIV, HPV, and meningitis. Rapid HIV testing in non-clinical, community-based settings has proven to be an effective strategy for reaching racial-ethnically diverse groups of young MSM and may provide a valuable opportunity to refer clients for vaccination, to help reduce health disparities across multiple diseases. In partnership with TruEvolution, the leading HIV prevention organization for MSM of color in Riverside, California, this mixed-methods project evaluates whether integrating direct messaging about HPV and meningitis vaccination into rapid HIV-testing visits increases vaccine acceptability and uptake.

This project is a collaboration with Brandon Brown (University of California, Riverside School of Medicine) and funded by a Fostering Interdisciplinary Research-early STage (FIRST) Pilot Grant from the Center for Health Disparities Research at the University of California, Riverside (2020–2021).

In 2018, HPV vaccine eligibility expanded from individuals aged 9–26 to include individuals aged 27–45. Using virtual focus groups with a socioeconomically and racial-ethnically diverse sample of adults aged 27–45 in California’s Inland Empire, this project examines unvaccinated individuals’ knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about HPV vaccination and barriers and facilitators to HPV vaccine uptake.

This project is funded by a Community Medicine and Population Health Mini Grant from the Center for Healthy Communities at the University of California, Riverside and the Riverside Community Health Foundation (2020).

HPV vaccination is a prosocial behavior because it confers protection to the vaccine recipient and others in their community. Research shows individuals with fewer resources tend to demonstrate greater prosocial behaviors – a propensity that may be driven by compassion for similarly disadvantaged others. Hence, prosocial messaging might be an effective means for encouraging vaccination in marginalized groups. This project collects survey data from adults aged 27–45 across the United States to examine whether exposure to messages emphasizing HPV vaccinations’ prosocial benefit for others (vs. messages emphasizing the benefit for the vaccine recipient) differentially influences vaccination intentions, based socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation.

This project is funded by a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Riverside (2019–2021).

This multi-pronged study focuses on several aspects of vaccination practices in Denmark including the impacts of family- and community-level socioeconomic status on whether childhood vaccination occurs and how misinformation may be shaping socioeconomic gaps in childhood vaccine uptake.

This project is a collaboration with Vibeke Tornhøj Christensen (VIVE, The Danish Center for Social Science Research) and Richard Carpiano (University of California, Riverside) and is funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation (2018–2022).