Orlando Harris, PhD, MPH, FNP

I am an Associate Professor of Nursing in the Department of Community Health Systems, School of Nursing, at the University of California, San Francisco. I am a researcher that uses community-based participatory research methods both in the United States and the Caribbean where I leverage multi-methods data to inform culturally relevant interventions that improves the lives of vulnerable sexual and gender minorities. I have also spent the past several years researching factors that contribute to poor health among Caribbean sexual and gender minorities. Through my research, I have provided a qualitative understanding of the complexities that have shaped Jamaican men and transgender women's sexual decision making as well as other factors that may place them at risk for acquiring HIV. Additionally, I have a unique focus on researching the context of violence that has shaped the lives of marginalized people in the United States and the Caribbean. I have published one of the first papers in the Caribbean that addressed the issue of sexual violence (childhood sexual abuse, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence) among Jamaican men and transgender women. This paper was also the first to address this issue among marginalized sexual minority groups in the Caribbean. My research aims to give voice to sexual and gender minorities in Jamaica and the wider Anglophone Caribbean in order to reduce disparities in health among a community that is marginalized.