Mary Hawk has been on the faculty in Behavioral and Community Health Sciences (BCHS) since 2012. She received her doctor of public health from BCHS after working in local nonprofits for a number of years. Her nonprofit work centered on HIV/AIDS direct services, grants management, and organizational leadership. She is currently assistant professor and senior associate director of the Evaluation Institute for Public Health, and teaches one of the core classes in BCHS: Program Planning and Proposal Writing.
Hawk’s primary research foci include evaluation and implementation of structural interventions to reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS and improve clinical outcomes for those living with the disease, as well as program evaluation to assess outcomes and improve service delivery in public health systems. Her current work includes implementation and evaluation research on a CDC-funded vaccine uptake grant, as well as a mixed methods evaluation study of best practices in an HIV clinic. She recently received funding from the Dean’s Pilot Grant Program to advance research on opioid drug and heroin addiction, specifically expanding Naloxone access.
In 2011, Hawk received the Catherine Cartier Ulrich Memorial Award for Public Health in Service to the Underserved for her work evaluating the effect of housing on viral loads of people living with HIV/AIDS. She published the only study to date that uses viral load to measure the impact of the housing first model of care on homeless people living with HIV/AIDS. Hawk is a founding board member of The Open Door, a local housing program that uses harm reduction and housing first approaches to engage marginalized people living with HIV/AIDS in clinical care. As part of this work, she has conducted evaluation research to assess the effect of client-centered representative payee services on medication adherence of people living with HIV/AIDS, and is currently seeking funding to test this model more rigorously. Hawk was inducted into Delta Omega in 2013 and is on the Editorial Board of AIDS and Behavior.
Established by University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health alumnus James L. Craig, MD, (EOH ’63), this award recognizes faculty who have excelled in the teaching and mentoring of students. Read more at publichealth.pitt.edu/craig.
5/01/2016