Kamila A. Alexander, PhD, MPH, RN
Assistant Professor
Department of Community-Public Health
Dr. Kamila A. Alexander’s research focuses on prevention of sexual health outcome disparities and the complex roles that structural determinants such as intimate partner violence, societal gender expectations, and limited economic opportunities play in the experience of intimate human relationships. Using health equity and social justice lenses, she aims to learn why men and women make particular sexual decisions, how they convey those decisions to their emotional partners, how we can promote safe relationships, and how we might expand current prevention efforts to mitigate intimate partner violence, unintended pregnancies, and sexually transmitted infections including HIV. The impetus for her research stems from over ten years of public health clinical practice in domestic and international communities living at the margins of society. Dr. Alexander has received funding to conduct research investigations through the National Institutes of Health, American Nurses Foundation, Sigma Theta Tau International, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. She earned her PhD in Nursing Science from the University of Pennsylvania where her dissertation focused on the emotional and structural drivers of sexual decision-making among young women living in Baltimore. Her scholarly trajectory aims to not only promote health and prevent health morbidities but also to lead and create investigations that affect practice and policy on a global scale.
Areas of Scholarly Expertise and Interest
Health intersection of intimate partner violence and HIV risk, health inequities, healthy sexuality, emerging adulthood, reproductive coercion, community-based research, social determinants of health
