Jenn Kwait

MHS, Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, 1993
PhD, Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, 1999

Areas of expertise:
Community-partnered research; Sexual and reproductive health among people assigned female sex at birth; Stigma; Social and behavioral sciences / Applied research; Qualitative methods

Background:
Dr. Jenn Kwait has worked in public health for over thirty years, beginning as a counselor and health educator at a women’s health care clinic in Philadelphia. This experience led her to a master’s degree program in public health and health education to develop the program development and evaluation skills necessary to support the reproductive health needs of the women served in the clinic. She then pursued a doctorate degree within the same department at Johns Hopkins, with her dissertation focusing on interorganizational relationships among HIV service organizations in Baltimore – specifically those funded by the new Ryan White CARE Act.

She is interested in “on-the-ground” programmatic work and served as the Director of Programs at The Women’s Collective, a community-based organization in DC serving women with HIV. As part of this work, she was the organizational liaison for all collaboration requests from outside researchers – an experience through which she saw first-hand the need for productive and mutually-beneficial university and community-based organization partnerships.

Dr. Kwait came to Whitman-Walker via Metro TeenAIDS, bringing with her a research project exploring wellness for LGBTQ+ youth, which centered a series of focus groups with youth and young adults about their experiences and challenges in accessing affirming care and gathering data from local thought leaders about unmet needs and opportunities for these young people. This project served as the basis for a series of community training courses implemented throughout the metropolitan area.

Currently, she is the Whitman-Walker site (sub-site of Johns Hopkins) Principal Investigator (PI) for the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) / Women’s HIV Interagency Study (WIHS) Combined Cohort Study (MWCCS) focusing on psychosocial and behavioral-related factors, with special interests in stigma and engagement and retention in the cohort. She also co-leads a PCORI-funded community engagement award to build capacity of LGBTQ+ people assigned female sex at birth to be full partners in future sexual and reproductive health care-focused research.

In addition, Dr. Kwait is a co-lead for the We Count Collaborative, a partnership of five federally qualified health centers and led by Whitman-Walker, to assess the impact of COVID on care for LGBTQ+ individuals. As part of this project, she leads the qualitative component focusing on the effect of COVID on clients, staff, organizations, and policy specific to gender-affirming care. She has also served as the Whitman-Walker site-PI (sub-site of Johns Hopkins) for a four-city NIH-funded study to assess the impact of a newly developed app and coaching intervention on the health of young sexual minority men of color and transfeminine and gender non-binary people of color (PUSH study). She has also been involved in a range of other projects at Whitman-Walker, including those focused on PrEP implementation across the city (DC CFAR), end-user input for a combined PrEP and contraception product (NIH via CONRAD at Eastern Virginia Medical School), and the development and validation of a web-based program to identify distress among people living with HIV (Gilead via Cancer Support Community).