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Dr. Wendee M. Wechsberg, PhD, is the Senior Director of the Substance Abuse Treatment Evaluations and Interventions Research Program at RTI International. Since its inception in 1999, this program has evolved to include a multimillion dollar yearly portfolio. In 2013, Dr. Wechsberg became the Director of the RTI Global Gender Center, a new initiative across the Institute and with collaborators domestically and internationally. She is also Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Gillings School of Global Public Health and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at North Carolina State University (NCSU), and Adjunct Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University School of Medicine. Dr. Wechsberg started her career in 1977 as an addiction clinician and later as a treatment director, but since 1994 has devoted her career fulltime to applied research using both mixed methods to develop and test the efficacy of HIV prevention interventions among diverse populations of substance abusers.

The Woman-Focused HIV Prevention program, known as the Women’s CoOp, was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) for more than 10 years. The Women’s CoOp is one of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) best-evidence HIV behavioral prevention interventions. It has been adapted specifically for underserved and vulnerable adult and adolescent women in the US, and in multiple regions in South Africa, Republic of Georgia and in Russia. One South African adaptation (Women’s Health CoOp) is listed in the USAID Promising Practices Project’s Compendium of Programs in Africa and has been packaged for scale up throughout South Africa and other regions. The theoretical framework of the women’s intervention is based on empowerment theory, which helps women to “take charge” of their lives by reducing substance use and learning sexual negotiation and communication skills.

Dr. Wechsberg collaborates with and mentors numerous faculty and researchers in institutions of higher learning in the United States and abroad, and she serves as a consultant to various national and international studies. In addition, Dr. Wechsberg utilizes community advisory boards for her research projects in the United States and South Africa to establish community-based networks and linkages, obtain critical feedback, and keep community stakeholders involved with her community-based trials. She also conducts policy forums when projects are completed to ensure dissemination and to develop plans for ‘real world’ implementation and sustainability.

In 2008, Dr. Wechsberg was ranked third among all NIH-funded researchers who received HIV/AIDS investigator-initiated grants (Science, 321[5880], 520–521). Currently, her research is funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and NIDA. Dr. Wechsberg has published extensively in the areas of gender and ethnicity, outreach, substance abuse treatment, HIV risk, cultural adaptations, and intervention outcomes.