Now that I have said a bit about
why I am blogging let me say a bit about who I am. With this introduction out of the way I can turn to discussing the sexual science that will be the focus of my blog.
When I was in high school I became fascinated by genetics and evolution. At the time scientists were more limited in their abilities to study human genetics (this was way before the days of the human genome project), but at the same time we knew genes played a role in some important medical conditions. When an administrator from the University of Minnesota came to my high school to talk about a program to spend a summer in the lab of a researcher at the University I jumped at the chance. I also jumped at the chance because it was funded by the National Science Foundation and Howard Hughes Foundation and it paid well by my standards at the time. I was fortunate to be accepted into the program and was matched with a biologist who was trying to understand how it is that cells know what to turn into-like blood cells, skin cells, neurons, etc-given that they all have the same genes. How is the fate of a cell determined? To study this, he was conducting genetics research on the hairs on the leaves of plants in the mustard family. The idea being if you can understand why one cell turns into a hair and another one part of the leaf it might teach us how to cure diseases where certain kinds of cells are not functioning or are damaged. I spent the summer learning how to conduct gel electrophoresis and other state-of-the-art genetic techniques of the time.
When I started college at Northwestern University I was intent on becoming a biologist. Then I took a Social Psychology course as a distribution requirement and became fascinated by the science of human behavior. Exploring questions like why some people hold discriminatory beliefs and why if someone is being attacked the more people watching the less each individual is likely to step in and help. These seemingly dueling interests made me feel conflicted. I loved the hard science of biology but was growing disenchanted with the sterility of the lab and now I was becoming fascinated with a "messy" science like psychology. Then one day one of my classes had a guest lecture on Behavior Genetics-the study of how genes influence behavior. For me it was the perfect marriage of my two interests.
To get into graduate school I knew I needed to start getting involved in some research on campus. I searched the school's (relatively) new website and found one faculty member on the whole campus conducting Behavior Genetics research. He studied the role of genes in the development of sexual orientation using twin and family studies. I immediately approached him and he agreed to let me work in his lab. My responsibilities in working in his lab involved interviewing gay men about other family members that might be gay. While I enjoyed the link to Behavior Genetics, I also became fascinated by how little we know about sexual development. In fact, while sex is one of the most important driving forces in people lives we know very little about it from a biological and psychological perspective because it is treated as a taboo subject. To me this was a challenge I wanted to take on.
My advisor and I ended up publishing a paper together and I was accepted into graduate school at Indiana University. Indiana University was a great match for me because the Psychology Department had faculty conducting cutting-edge Behavior Genetics research and there is also the Kinsey Institute, which has both a rich history and current program of sexuality research. Much of my graduate training and experience was in what might be considered the "basic research" side of Clinical Psychology. My work was focused on understanding the role of genes in sexual development and behavior as well as basic processes such as affect and personality. I was receiving applied clinical training in couples and sex therapy, but my primary interests were in research. I was fortunate to be able to take a summer off and work at the National Institutes of Health with Dr. Dean Hamer and we published a highly publicized study on the genetics of male sexual orientation. I was on my way to being a basic research scientist focused on understanding sexual development and health. Then I went on my Psychology Internship- a final year of intense clinical training that is part of the Clinical Psychology doctorate.
I arrived at my internship site with a goal of doing as much research as possible and then going on to a faculty position doing laboratory research. I started working with a faculty member on internship that was studying the role of affect regulation in HIV prevention among youth with psychiatric illness. What was amazing to me was that she was conducting important research on the role of affect in HIV risk behaviors while at the same time delivering a program likely to reduce HIV infection in an at risk population. My perspective at the time was that the laboratory-and not the community-was the place to work these things out, but this experience changed my mind. At the same time research was coming out about the devastating epidemic of HIV among young gay and bisexual men. Some studies were showing as many as one in six young gay and bisexual men were infected with HIV. This was my community and I had the skills to do something about the epidemic. I knew I couldn't stay in the lab doing research that, while important, wouldn't soon make a dent in the epidemic. So I decided to focus my research on the health and development of LGBT people, with a particular focus on youth. My goal became translating findings from research into advancing public health as rapidly as possible.
My current research focuses on using the Internet to provide HIV prevention education, developing and testing HIV prevention groups, understanding the development of sexual orientation (still from a biopsychosocial perspective), and learning about the prevalence and risk factors for mental health among LGBT youth. I hold a faculty position in the Institute for Juvenile Research and Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I have several grants from the National Institutes of Health focused on HIV risk and prevention and was fortunate to recently be named a William T Grant Foundation Scholar for my work on the use of the Internet to promote positive sexual development.
Part of my goal for writing this blog is to help share some of the knowledge gained in my own and other studies. While we still have a lot of learn, we do know a lot about the development of sexual orientation, how to prevent HIV, and how to promote and protect the health of LGBT people. The goal of this blog is to discuss the whole continuum of sexuality-health, development, orientation, and risk.
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