My work is designed to give politicians
and policymakers the information they
need to make better decisions for better
public health.
I'm Gregg Gonsalves I'm an assistant
professor of epidemiology at the Yale
School of Public Health.
My research is at the interface of human
rights and public health research and
practice. It's devoted to addressing the
inequities in health services for poor
and marginalized populations. I dropped
out of college in the 80s at the height
of the AIDS epidemic, and ended up
joining an activist group called Act Up.
In my 40s I decided I wanted a new set
of tools to do the work and decided to
come back to school getting a degree in
biology and then a PhD in public health
with a mind toward taking quantitative
tools to improve the responses to public
health and age service provision all
across the world. I use a variety of
quantitative techniques to address
deficiencies in the provision of care
largely for HIV. One of the projects I'm
working on now is using a set of
algorithms or mathematical tools that
were originally designed to figure out
how to go to the hottest slot machine in
the casino, but we're using that same
kind of thinking and decision-making
algorithms to figure out where to test
for HIV infection to find the greatest
number of HIV positive people who are still undiagnosed and don't know their status.
I consider my work a hybrid a mix of
different kinds of disciplines and
approaches. One is that of social justice
and human rights activism and the other
is a public health research quantitative
analysis and science and I think they're
both necessary in order to sort of
combat key public health crises. In 2012,
Amy Kapcyznski, Ali Miller, and myself
got together to form the global health
justice partnership which was a
collaboration between Yale's public
health school and law school and the idea was
to address the inequities in health
around the world. You need a combination
legal reform, social mobilization, and
advocacy. We found by combining these
three approaches to social and health
and justice we can make improvements
with our partners around the world. We've
had a variety of projects with different
nongovernmental organizations. We've
worked in partnership with groups to
think through the issues that confront
them whether it's the cholera outbreak
in Haiti, whether it's silicosis in
tuberculosis is among gold miners in
southern Africa, whether it's the
cost of hepatitis C drugs around the
world- we're trying to sort of put
together partners between academia and
non-governmental organization and others
who care about these issues to sort of
push things forward. We have a paper
which looks at the Scott County HIV
outbreak and through a mathematical
model we can recreate the dynamics of
what happened there over the years from
2011 to 2015. We use data to sort of
offer counterfactuals or what if
statements based in data and based in
rigorous analysis to sort of give
policymakers a window onto what would
have happened if they had done the right
thing. This quest is personal,
in 1996 I found out I was HIV positive
and the fight for social justice and for
health equity has deep roots in my own
personal history, but also I belong to a
worldwide community now of people fighting
for the rights of people with
tuberculosis with hepatitis with HIV and
it's not a career it's a passion...
it's my life's work.
