Featured Speakers for IWD 2015

• Date: Friday, March 6, 2015
• Time: Doors open at 1:15 p.m., program begins at 1:30pm
• Location: Price Center Ballroom West Ballroom A

"Social and Economic Empowerment to Improve Sexual and Reproductive Health among High-Risk Women and Girls"

Lianne Urada, PhD, MSW, LCSW  is an Assistant Professor at UC San Diego in the Division of Global Public Health, Department of Medicine and a core faculty member of the Center on Gender Equity and Health.  She is recipient of a 5 year NIDA K01 award and NIH Fogarty International University of California Global Health Institute GloCal award, examining community mobilization and its potential to reduce HIV/STI risk among women in the sex trade in Tijuana, Mexico. 

After receiving her PhD in Social Welfare at UCLA, Dr. Urada completed a NIDA T32 Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Fordham University Research Ethics Training Institute Fellowship, and published on women and girls involved in sex trade and sex trafficking in the Philippines, Russia, and Latin America.  Recently, she served as a Technical Review Committee member for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), reviewing studies on the prevalence of violence against women in the Pacific. 

Dr. Urada is also a Co-investigator on an NIMH R01 Men Count study of HIV case management interventions with Black men in Washington DC., and for a nationwide U.S. based Kaiser-funded community based HIV Test and Treat Initiative. She has held a License in Clinical Social Work since 1998 and worked with women, men, and families living with HIV for eight years in Los Angeles County. She served as faculty director for the UC San Diego AIDS Research Institute’s HIV University Project, and is on the Board of Directors for Christie's Place (transforming the lives of women affected by HIV/AIDS in San Diego).  

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Elizabeth Reed, ScD, Assistant Professor, has focused her work on gender-based violence and HIV prevention in multiple global settings, with particular attention to the influence of social, economic, and structural factors on risk (e.g. economic position, gender and social inequities and norms, housing instability, neighborhood factors).

Dr. Reed’s recent work in the US has involved investigation of social and environmental contexts in relation to teen dating violence perpetration among boys and men, as well as the mechanisms explaining the link between such perpetration and STI/HIV risk. Abroad, much of her focus has involved investigation of women’s social, economic, and  environmental contexts in influencing exposure to gender-based violence and HIV. In the US and abroad, her work involves population-based research as well as program implementation and evaluation.

Dr. Reed holds an MPH from Boston University and received her ScD in Social Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health. She trained as a postdoctoral associate for a year each at Yale University Center for Research on AIDS and at the Duke Global Health Institute.

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Alyssa is a Communications major with a minor in Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She began writing and performing spoken word at the age of fourteen with With Our Words Inc., a non-profit organization that works to enhance the relationship between language, writing, and performance for underrepresented student populations in her hometown Stockton, California. Alyssa has continued to work with the organization, representing Stockton in the Brave New Voices international youth poetry slam in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and returned as a youth mentor, workshop facilitator, and coach in 2013.  Alyssa continues to write and balance full-time course work in hopes of producing a chapbook of her writings within the next year.

Read her amazing piece from last year, Teachable Moments.