I am an Assistant Professor in the College of Medicine and Special Treatment and Research (STAR) Program at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, a co-investigator in the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) / Women’s Interagency HIV Study (WIHS) Combined Cohort Study (MACS/WIHS-CCS), and a co-Director of the BRooklyn Initiative to Develop Geriatrics Education (BRIDGE) Program at SUNY Downstate. I have over 24 years of experience in the design and implementation of ethnographic, survey and qualitative research in the United States and Southern and Eastern Africa. My intellectual interests range across Medical and Linguistic Anthropology, with a substantive focus on HIV and Aging, Social Determinants of Health, Health Communication, Mental Health, Sexual and Reproductive Health, Comparative Systems of Health and Healing in Africa, and Treatment and health-seeking behaviors. I endeavor to be a leader in the area of developing culturally appropriate, and community-based approaches to interventions that address racial and ethnic health disparities in care and treatment, especially among older adults and older adults with HIV in the US and Africa. In 2011, she was awarded an NIMH Career Development Award to identify the prevention needs of older women with HIV and developed a Healthy HIV Aging intervention. And in 2013, she became a Butler-William Scholar at the National Institute of Aging.