Louisa Gilbert

Dr. Louisa Gilbert has served as the Co-Director of the Social Intervention Group (SIG) since 1999 and the Co-Director of the Global Health Research Center of Central Asia (GHRCCA) since 2007. She is a licensed social worker with over 25 years of experience developing, implementing and testing multi-level interventions that address the syndemic mechanisms linking substance misuse, gender-based violence (GBV), trauma and HIV/AIDS among key affected communities in the U.S. and Central Asia. Her specific area of research interest has concentrated on advancing a continuum of evidence-based interventions to prevent intimate partner violence (IPV) and GBV among women and women in the criminal justice system (see projectwings.org). She has co-authored over 150 peer reviewed articles from this research. More recently, she has focused on implementing evidence-based interventions to prevent opioid overdose among people who inject drugs in Central Asia with the investigative team at SIG and GHRCCA. Dr. Gilbert has also recently developed and is currently teaching a new course on “Harm Reduction Policies, Programming and Practice to Tackle the Opioid Epidemic.”

• Social  Intervention Group (SIG)
• Global Health Research Center of Central Asia (GHRCCA)
• Project WINGS of HOPE: Redressing Gender-based Violence among Women who use Drugs in Kyrgyzstan
• Project PACT: Couple HIV Prevention for Drug-Involved Male Offenders: An Effectiveness Trial
• Connect N’ Unite: Novel HIV Prevention for African American, Methamphetamine-Involved Male Couples

• Intervention research to address co-occurring problems of gender-based violence, substance abuse, trauma and HIV among women drug users
• Overdose prevention research
• Services research on intimate partner violence, HIV and drug use among women in the criminal justice system
• Design and testing of multimedia prevention interventions
• Implementation research to improve delivery of evidence-based peer-driven interventions in Harm Reduction Programs