Policy

Stefan Baral, MD (he/him) is a physician epidemiologist and the Director of the Key Populations Program at the Center for Public Health and Human Rights in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Stefan completed his training at the University of Toronto in Community Medicine as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and Family medicine with the Canadian Council of Family Physicians and provides clinical care through the Inner-City Health Associates in Toronto. Through his role as the Director of the Key Populations Program in the CPHHR, Stefan has focused on trying to understand why people continue to be at risk for acquiring and transmitting HIV with a focus on the interactions of structural and network level determinants with individual-level proximal risks for HIV infection. Together with colleagues, Stefan focuses on using all scientific tools available to characterize the distribution of HIV risks including in countries with broadly generalized HIV epidemics. This work has included studying the burden of HIV and HIV-related vulnerabilities among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men; transgender women; people who use drugs; and sex workers in a range of HIV epidemic settings. In response to the disproportionate burden of HIV among populations with specific vulnerabilities, Stefan has participated in advancing the standardization of methods and measures in HIV-related implementation research to study how best to implement programs serving marginalized communities.