Brian Pence
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Effective mental health care often never reaches people in places with few psychiatrists or psychologists. Counseling that trained non-specialists can deliver works, but integrating it into everyday medical care is difficult.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
- Topics
women living with HIV
perinatal depression
postpartum depression
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Feb 2029
What they work on
- Test in a randomized controlled trial whether a counseling intervention for perinatal depression, delivered by non-specialists, improves depression and HIV care engagement in women living with HIV in Malawi compared with usual care.
- Measure infant HIV, health and developmental outcomes through 12 months postpartum, and collect implementation science metrics in a hybrid trial design to speed translation into practice.
- Test in a cluster-randomized trial whether adding LOCI leadership coaching to a staff champion strategy improves adoption, reach and fidelity of task-shared mental health treatment in Malawian general medical care.
- Assess how leadership alignment changes facility climate, patient mental health outcomes and cost-effectiveness of mental health integration.
- Support PRI3SM projects to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission with implementation study designs, strategy selection, outcome measurement and readiness assessments, while training students in implementation science.
More about the research
Working in Malawi, a country with high HIV prevalence, these projects test both a mental health treatment and the strategies needed to bring proven programs into clinics. A connected core supports implementation science, the study of how to put proven health interventions into routine practice, for an infant infection prevention program.
Why it matters
Women living with HIV in Malawi who develop depression around pregnancy may lose touch with HIV care, endangering their own health and their infants'. A proven counseling model delivered by non-specialists could improve both mental health and HIV outcomes. Evidence on leadership coaching could help clinics in Malawi and resource-limited settings such as the rural U.S. adopt mental health care.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Enhanced problem-solving therapy and HIV engagement support to improve perinatal mental health and HIV outcomes in Malawi: A randomized controlled trial
NIH · Jul 2024 – Feb 2029
Aligning facility leadership and climate to advance mental health services integration in Malawi
NIH · Jun 2023 – Mar 2028
Implementation Science Core [Parent Title: PREVENTING INFANT INFECTIONS WITH IMPLEMENTATION SCIENCE IN MALAWI]
NIH · May 2023 – Mar 2028
Closest labs
Bibhav Acharya
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Co-design INCLUDE, a digital tool combining clinic-visit stigma assessment, a health-worker dashboard and a library of stigma-reduction activities, with people living with HIV and health workers, then pre-pilot it at one clinic in Nepal.
Vivian Go
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether the brief alcohol intervention (BAI), counseling based on Motivational Interviewing and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, improves PrEP persistence and adherence in a randomized trial of 564 PrEP users with unhealthy drinking in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Lauren Haack
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Psychology
Test whether students in schools using CLS-A-FUERTE, a school clinician training and ADHD/ODD intervention program, improve more in parent- and teacher-rated symptoms than students receiving usual services, in a cluster randomized trial across 40 Mexican schools.
The school
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 523 research doctorates a year.
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