Events

UVM Vice President of Research Kirk Dombrowski, PhD will present “Understanding the Conflict Between Withdrawal and Disease Avoidance in the Risk Networks of People Who Inject Drugs in Rural Puerto Rico: A Network Statistical Approach.”

This talk will provide audience members with information on research conducted on the topic of opioid addiction. The work described was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Drug Abuse, and present recent analyses and previously published results. By the end of the lecture, attendees should be able to better describe the conjoined forces of addiction and disease risk among injecting drug users in rural Puerto Rico.

Kirk Dombrowski, PhD became vice president for research at the University of Vermont (UVM) in April 2020. Prior to joining UVM, Dr. Dombrowski held several leadership positions at the University of Nebraska (UNL). He was the founding director of the UNL’s Rural Drug Addiction Research Center, an NIH designated Center of Biomedical Research Excellence; interim director of the Nebraska Center for Virology, a ~90,000-square-foot biochemistry research institute; and director of UNL’s Minority Health Disparities Initiative, a university-wide faculty, recruitment, development, and community engagement initiative that he was brought to Nebraska to lead in 2013. A cultural anthropologist by training, Dr. Dombrowski is also an active researcher whose work straddles the social and behavioral health sciences, a link he has used to address issues public of concern and social good, such as HIV infection dynamics, drug and alcohol addiction, minority health disparities, and suicide prevention in Native American/First Nation communities. His research has received funding from NSF, NIH, and numerous foundation sources, and his published work has appeared in social science, computer science and health science journals.