Meet Clare Barrington, PhD
Clare Barrington, MPH, PhDJanuary 27, 2009 -- Clare Barrington is delighted by the welcome she has received at UNC. Since her arrival in Chapel Hill last August, “my experiences with mentorship and collaboration have far surpassed my expectations,” she says.
With support from the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases, Barrington joined the faculty of the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education in the Gillings School of Global Public Health.
A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (MPH, PhD), Barrington works in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, where she uses qualitative and quantitative methods to study social network influences on health and health behaviors.
According to Barrington, the study of social networks can lead to the development of health interventions that tap directly into naturally-existing social outlets and target a particular community. “In the Dominican Republic, for example, I conducted a study on the social networks of male clients of female sex workers that we are using to develop an HIV prevention intervention with this population.”
Now that she is at UNC, Dr. Barrington is developing research projects to examine social networks in the context of migration among Latinos in North Carolina. “[Here] I have been able to develop new ideas as well as bring my experiences to the context of established projects, a balance that is extremely important for a junior faculty member,” Barrington says.
Her research has been published in AIDS Care, Culture, Health, and Sexuality and the American Journal of Public Health. She teaches courses on qualitative research methods and global health.
