As of September, I’ve been setting up shop to undertake the work of my study, Adapting a nutrition intervention to address low fruits and vegetables intake, a cancer risk, among people living with HIV receiving care in HIV clinics in Uganda. I expected a very processed based, check-list type of start-up to the project similar to other projects I’ve work on previously. While there certainly have been activities of this type like writing IRBs and creating budgets, there has also been much creativity and deep thinking about the critical issues to human health that as a global health researcher I care about like cancer prevention and the role nutrition plays in cancer risk reduction–specific to Uganda.
This iterative process has been spearheaded by the wonderful in-country ACHIEVE team. Meeting with Dr. Aggrey Semeere and Dr. Nixon Niyonzima has provided an exceptional critical thinking platform that has improved the quality of the tools (e.g., qualitative interview guides, standard operating procedures for the data collection team) for the study and offered invaluable insight into potential data applications for future work in Uganda. As a result, their contribution along-side that of my NYU implementation science mentor Dr. Donna Shelley and her team at NYU, has led to an enlightening and invigorating study development process that has prioritized the implementation science aspect of this project—local context, local needs, local teams. There has also been incredible support from Dr. Yesim Tozan in connecting the Fogarty-NYU-Uganda pieces. It really has taken a village to get the study going.
It has taken a lot of time, diligence, and commitment from the study team to test the tools and get to this almost-in-the-field-data-collection stage. I am extremely excited for the next stage of this study, continuing to work alongside this extraordinary team, and the future research that will stem from this excellent collaboration that has been established under ACHIEVE.