Dr. Jennifer Belus

Adolescents and young adults in sub-Saharan Africa are facing increasing threats to health and overall quality of life.This project seeks to address adolescent and young adult well-being by simultaneously tackling alcohol and other drug (AOD) use, inequitable gender beliefs, and high rates of unemployment in Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Specifically, this project aims to develop and test a brief, behavioral intervention to reduce problem AOD use and gender inequitable beliefs, which will be delivered to adolescent and young adult peer groups and embedded within existing vocational training programs. The study will also assess vocational training program characteristics that may facilitate or hinder scaling up of the proposed intervention, should it be successful. This study is conducted in collaboration with the University of Zambia, SolidarMed Zambia and Zimbabwe, and the South African Medical Research Council. The study is funded through the Solution-oriented Research for Development Programme, which is jointly funded by SNSF and SDC (Grant no. 400440_213259).

Studying if men living with HIV who hold unhelpful idealized beliefs about masculinity have more difficulty disclosing their HIV status, and in turn, are less likely to be retained in HIV care. This study is conducted in collaboration with the University of Cape Town and the University of Maryland and is funded by the US National Institute of Mental Health (Grant no. R21MH123280).

For many people living in rural settings in Lesotho, weekly attendance for behavioral intervention sessions to address mental health and substance use can be challenging. In this study, we will test whether one in-person session plus standardized SMSs is superior to a 4-session in-person intervention, delivered by non-specialist mental health providers. This project is conducted in collaboration with SolidarMed Lesotho and is funded by an Ambizione grant through the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant no. PZ00P1_201690).