Adrian Guta
Adrian Guta has a PhD in Social & Behavioural Health Sciences, with a collaborative program in Bioethics, from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. His doctoral research examined HIV community-based research in Canada, with a focus on ethical issues that emerge when conducting collaborative research. Adrian is currently a CIHR postdoctoral fellow in Health Services & Population Health HIV/AIDS Research housed jointly at Carleton University and Simon Fraser University. He is also a Health Care, Technology, and Place (HCTP) postdoctoral fellow, and has held Ontario HIV Treatment Network and Universities Without Walls (UWW) doctoral fellowships in the past. Adrian’s postdoctoral research examines sociocultural and ethical issues in the scale-up of new HIV treatment and prevention technologies, and their impacts on communities which are stigmatized and marginalized in the healthcare system and disproportionately burdened by HIV/AIDS. His research interests include: HIV/AIDS, sociocultural aspects of health and illness, public health, rhetoric, bioethics, governmentality studies, surveillance studies, qualitative research, and community-based research.
Examining the influence of HIV “treatment as prevention” in clinical and community-based practice
My proposed research will solicit the perspectives of HIV clinical care and social service providers about changes to their practice following the shift to “treatment as prevention” (TasP). I will conduct qualitative interviews with care providers to understand opportunities and challenges for HIV prevention and care within this programmatic milieu. My proposed research is informed by critical bioethics and will use a “situational analysis” design to situate interview data alongside relevant sociocultural, technological, organizational/institutional, and discursive elements to understand the influence of the shift to TasP in HIV clinical and community-based care encounters. My work attempts to understand the implications of moving from TasP as epidemiological modeling to clinical and public health practice with people living with and at risk of HIV. This postdoctoral project contributes to the SRC’s vision of promoting research that attends to the social determinants of health, human rights, and service provision, while using a social-structural lens to examine the implications of a biomedical intervention. Financial support from the SRC will support my ability to conduct my fieldwork and data collection, cover research related costs (e.g., transcription and honoraria), and access additional mentoring, partnering, and dissemination opportunities.
