Having trouble viewing this email? View it as a webpage.

Misperceived Social Norms as Drivers of HIV Prevention: Exploring Opportunities for Individual and Social Change

Please join us for a week of presentations from the 2024 ODP Early Stage Investigator Lecture (ESIL) awardees! The second lecture will be delivered by Dr. Jessica Perkins from Vanderbilt University. ODP’s ESIL award recognizes early career prevention scientists who are poised to become future leaders in prevention research.

About the Lecture

Understanding how perceptions about normative health behaviors drive individual health behaviors has been a focus of substance use prevention efforts for more than three decades in the United States. However, social norms about HIV prevention and treatment behaviors are understudied as drivers of health-promoting behavior and prevention intervention uptake. Stronger HIV prevention is needed, particularly in many parts of Southern and Eastern Africa. In this presentation, Dr. Jessica Perkins describes misperceived HIV-related norms and why these misperceptions matter for multiple levels of HIV prevention. She discusses developing interventions to harness perceptions about existing protective norms to enhance the uptake of HIV-related health behavior interventions.

About Jessica Perkins

Dr. Jessica Perkins is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development and serves as core faculty at the Vanderbilt Institute of Global Health. In her interdisciplinary work as a social and behavioral scientist, Dr. Perkins explores social norms and social networks as drivers of substance use, violence, and HIV prevention and treatment and co-occurring behaviors and health outcomes. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed scientific papers, many of which focus on misperceptions about health-promoting norms within local networks as opportunities to implement norms-based strategies to prompt individual and collective change. 

This webinar will be captioned in real-time. Individuals needing reasonable accommodations should email prevention@nih.gov. Requests should be made at least 5 business days before the event.

This event is open to the public and there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. Please feel free to share this information widely. 

Can't be there? A recording of this lecture will be available approximately 4 weeks after the presentation. You can view the full archive of previous Early Stage Investigator Lectures on the Office of Disease Prevention website.

Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives (DPCPSI)