B R Simon Rosser
University of Minnesota, MN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Across health care, some groups are poorly served because the people providing care, or doing research, are not trained or equipped to reach them. Studies here focus on sexual and gender minority (SGM) populations, meaning lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender non-binary people, and on sexual and reproductive health training for health workers.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Education Research
- Topics
sexual and gender minorities
LGBTQ health
transgender health
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Analyze the policies of 362 nursing homes and 362 assisted living facilities in Minnesota, covering hiring, training, anti-discrimination and data collection, to see how many already support culturally responsive care for sexual and gender minority residents.
- Develop an online version of the Training to Serve curriculum, pilot it, and compare it with in-person training and a waitlist in a group-randomized trial across 62 long-term care agencies, measuring staff knowledge, skills and agency policies.
- Interview sexual minority men, sexual minority women and transgender or non-binary cancer patients, along with a heterosexual cisgender comparison group, to identify barriers to and facilitators of joining NIH cancer research, including the role of discrimination.
- Compare the yield, cost and workload of two clinic strategies based on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) medical-record data with three online strategies for recruiting small SGM cancer patient populations.
- Test the medium- and long-term effects of an African-centered sexual health curriculum on Tanzanian health students' knowledge, attitudes and counseling skills, in a single-blinded randomized trial with follow-up up to 24 months.
- Build and pilot a train-the-trainer program for faculty at two more Tanzanian health universities, then test in an observational Phase IV study whether the curriculum works when taught by local faculty.
More about the research
The common thread is rigorous testing, often through randomized trials, of training programs and methods that could improve care and research participation for under-served groups. This work spans long-term dementia care in Minnesota, cancer research recruitment across the US, and health professional education in Tanzania.
Why it matters
This work could give care agencies, states and researchers tested tools to serve under-reached groups. Results may show Minnesota policymakers whether rules are needed for culturally responsive dementia care, and may provide a scalable online training for long-term care staff. It may also identify cost-effective ways to recruit sexual and gender minority cancer patients into research. In Tanzania, it could support a sexual health curriculum that becomes standard training and is adapted elsewhere in Africa and other low- and middle-income countries.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Evaluating the effects of reproductive health training on provider behavior
NIH · Sep 2018 – Aug 2028
Testing Effective Methods to Recruit Sexual and Gender Minority Cancer Patients for Cancer Studies
NIH · Aug 2022 – Jul 2027
Training the Long-term Services and Supports Workforce in Responsive Care
NIH · Sep 2022 – May 2027
Closest labs
Kristen Mark
University of Minnesota, MN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Conduct a social ecological needs assessment of reproductive and sexual health care delivery for persons with disabilities in Tanzania, interviewing about 20 persons with disabilities and 20 caregivers about their experiences accessing care.
Meghan Romanelli
University of Washington, WA·Psychology·Early-career
Characterize current and predicted patterns of engagement with Mental Health America's digital mental health resources among sexual and gender minority users, and the user traits linked to them, using supervised machine learning.
Sabrina Boyce
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Estimate the causal effect of state anti-SGM and SGM-affirming laws adopted from 2021 to 2025 on sexual and intimate partner violence among SGM youth, using difference-in-differences analysis of Youth Risk Behavior Survey data.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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