Q: You are helping to found a new HIV awareness day: HIV Cure Research Day, to raise public consciousness about the search for and continued need for an HIV cure. How did you become interested in working in HIV, and what has inspired you to establish this new awareness day?
A: I originally became interested in HIV because I was working on my dissertation, and my research broadly was about how Black gay men manage stigma around being Black and gay in religious spaces. Many men have to navigate being either in predominantly Black church spaces that are not always gay-affirming or going to predominantly White gay-affirming spaces that are not always Black affirming. They often talked about the challenges around navigating experiences with racism and not being able to escape their skin color, and also about navigating experiences where they were discriminated against for being same gender loving. Often, the stigma around HIV was also a tie to their identity and their experiences, even if they did not have HIV. So I started to ask questions and get more interested in HIV because of their experiences and my observations from spending time with them.
I started on a research project that got me involved in doing community engagement work around HIV clinical trials—educating people about clinical trials, doing community organizing, and using social media and other arts in creative ways to engage people about clinical trials. That led me into my postdoctoral research, where I used those methods to then create crowdsourcing contests—basically this idea of getting community-based ideas to solve problems. One of the problems that I was interested in solving, and worked with a team of scientists to solve, was how to get people engaged in finding a cure for HIV.
We hosted contests where we would give participants prizes for the most creative and best ideas. They could submit paintings, poetry, songs, ideas for apps, or ideas that we could then turn into campaign material to raise awareness about HIV clinical trials and HIV more broadly. That also expanded, so I started doing contests for PrEP, for HIV self-testing kits, and for COVID vaccine awareness. I was really using it as a mechanism to engage people about HIV.
Read more here: https://aidsvu.org/dr-allison-mathews-on-hiv-cure-research-day/
