Answering the Call
COLLEGE OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES
Dr. Barreras continues her journey as a mentee, a researcher, and a community partner.
Assistant Professor Dr. Joanna Barreras in the College of Health and Human Services is the recent recipient of a CFAR Adelante Program grant amounting to $200,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) at Emory University, administered in partnership with the NIH District of Columbia CFAR. The CFAR Adelante program seeks to support early-career researchers who focus on research in HIV prevention and HIV treatment among Latine communities with a mentorship program. Dr. Barreras is now receiving mentorship from Dr. Laura Bogart at the RAND Corporation and Dr. Laramie Smith at CFAR. Dr. Ron Brooks, the Director of Research and Evaluation at Bienestar, Human Services, Inc., is her community partner. Through their support and guidance, she aims to develop as a researcher and better respond to the communities she researches and serves.
“I could definitely say in terms of my lived experience and my whole trajectory that I am where I am because of mentorship,” says Dr. Barreras, who is the daughter of Mexican American immigrants and the first in her family to earn a degree with a minor in criminal justice. Her journey in higher education started at CSULB, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology. As a student at CSULB, she worked at the Education Opportunity Program (EOP), which helps low-income, first-generation, or underserved applicants gain access to higher education. As she approached graduation, Harrelson Nota, an academic counselor at EOP, mentored her and helped her seek admission to California State University, Los Angeles’ forensic social work master’s program.
Dr. Barreras again received mentorship in her master’s program, and it changed the course of her academic career. While studying to be a probation officer and even completing internships that gained her experience in the field, she also entered a program called Bridges to the Doctoral Program. This program finds talented master’s students that could be PhD researchers focusing on health disparities. After finding out about the program and realizing the impact she could make on underserved communities in Los Angeles, she sought the mentorship she needed to get into the PhD program at UCLA. Now, she says, “I know the power of mentorship.”
The CFAR Adelante grant will not only help Dr. Barreras achieve larger grants and develop as a researcher but will also affect her current research, which focuses on mental health in HIV treatment and prevention in the Latine community. “I began my appointment at Cal State Long Beach in the fall of 2020, and during that time, I really wanted to respond to a call to action from the Latina transgender women community,” says Dr. Barreras.
Dr. Barreras has been involved in the research programs at community-based social services organization Bienestar, where she works with Dr. Ron Brooks on her mentorship team. Two of Bienestar’s research projects study how discrimination and intersectional stigma can disrupt adherence to a treatment plan for Latine men who have sex with men living with HIV or at risk of contracting HIV. The objective of the projects is to arm the men in the programs with the ability to continue to take their medication or initiate HIV prevention medication and look after/advocate for their health and wellbeing even when they experience discrimination or aggression. When the research group presented these programs to the Bienestar community, Latina transgender women expressed a need for similar support because of the profiling, aggression, and transphobia they experience from police officers and law enforcement.
Building a similar program at Bienestar for Latina transgender women is the focus of Dr. Barreras’ current research. Right now the project is in a formative stage, and Dr. Barreras is conducting in-depth interviews with Latina transgender women, holding community workshops, and gaining input and support from housing specialists, lawyers, and healthcare providers with experience providing culturally responsive services to transgender women. After analyzing the data she collects through this process, she will bring the plan to the community for their input. Finally, she will write the manual for the program itself and begin to test it out among the community.
In the meantime, the Center for HIV Identification, Prevention, and Treatment Services (CHIPTS) also awarded her funds to develop a trust-building intervention with Latina transgender women and law enforcement through hosting events and town halls where Latina transgender women and police officers can interact. She was able to participate in the training days for the Los Angeles Police Department and talk to the law enforcement officers about implicit bias. She is currently meeting with police chiefs in police departments in Southern California and is finding that there is interest among these law enforcement officers to make progress and foster change.
Dr. Barreras feels that her responsibility to the community is a privilege, and she is pleased to see the impact of the programs that she is creating. “The community is waiting for us, and we really do need to respond to these calls to action. We want to be able, with community-based participatory research, to have that relationship where we work together,” says Dr. Barreras. She says that too often, researchers come to a community to get data and never come back after they’ve published. But this is not her approach. “For me, what I do is not a job or anything like that. For me it’s a pleasure and a joy,” she says.