September 6, 2005—Pamela Brown-Peterside '86, a New York-based public health consultant who has spent the last decade conducting HIV-prevention research on women at sexual risk of infection, will give a public talk Friday, September 16 at Oberlin College.

The talk, titled "HIV/AIDS and Women from New York to Rural Uganda: Fundamental Causes and Consequences," will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Oberlin Science Center's West Lecture Hall, 119 Woodland St.

In her talk, the Oberlin alumna will compare and contrast the AIDS epidemic among women in the United States and in Sub-Saharan Africa, using case studies from New York City and rural Uganda. By highlighting the overlap in these two seemingly different contexts, she also will connect the AIDS epidemic with college students, both female and male, and draw implications for HIV prevention.

Brown-Peterside is a board member of the African Services Committee, a social service agency serving the largest number of African immigrants in New York City. She was a consultant last year to a program in rural Uganda that deals with the prevention of maternal-to-child transmission of AIDS.

For a decade she was an assistant member in the New York Blood Center (NYBC) Laboratory of Infectious Disease Prevention and the leading researcher in studies of HIV infection among high-risk women. She also directed an NYBC project in the South Bronx focusing on HIV vaccine preparedness studies, trials, and behavioral interventions.

Brown-Peterside was born and reared in Nigeria. She earned a bachelor's degree in sociology/anthropology from Oberlin, a master's degree in public health from the University of Michigan, and a doctoral degree in sociomedical sciences from Columbia University.

The September 16 talk is presented by the Department of Sociology's J. Milton Yinger Lectureship, with the support of the College's African American Studies Department, the Office of the Dean of Students, and the Oberlin Student Health Peer-to-Peer HIV Testing Program.

The lectureship was established in honor of Yinger, an acclaimed social scientist who retired from Oberlin in 1987 after 40 years teaching at the College. Renowned for his work in the sociology of religion, race relations, and educational psychology, Yinger and his Oberlin colleague George E. Simpson (d. 1998) co-authored Racial and Cultural Minorities: An Analysis of Prejudice and Discrimination, a modern classic now in its fifth edition.