MARIA MESSINA, PhD
Dr. Messina is an integral member of SAE's Parity & Compliance team, and has been instrumental in program evaluation and in the generation of community health needs assessments on behalf of our clients.
Maria Messina, PhD, is a medical anthropologist with nearly 30 years of experience conducting both long- and short-term ethnographic fieldwork, nationally and internationally, with funding from Fulbright, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Institute of Health (NIH), and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ).
Maria’s areas of expertise range from indigenous healing practices and popular culture in North Africa to public health and ethno-epidemiological fieldwork among a variety of vulnerable populations at high risk for multiple morbidities, i.e., the reception or transmission of HIV/AIDS, other STI’s, and behavioral health disorders.
The populations of focus include, e.g., ethnic minority and gender variant young and adult men who have sex with men (Y/MSM); youth at risk for drug use and forensic involvement in a Venezuelan favela, homeless youth in NYC who injected crack; long-term outcomes of adjudicated youth in residential drug treatment in the U.S. and Canada; and homeless, severely mentally ill adults with alcohol, drug dependencies, and/or other co-morbidities.
Maria also has extensive experience as a program evaluator of projects funded by The Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC), The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Gilead Science, The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), and The AIDS Institute.
