Assistant Professor of Epidemiology

Overview

Alexandra (Alex) B. Collins, PhD, MSc (she/her/hers) is a medical social scientist and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology where she works as a member of the People, Place, and Health Collective. Dr. Collins uses community-engaged qualitative and ethnographic methods to examine social, structural, and environmental factors that impact people who use drugs across drug use risk environments, with a focus on how these intersect across social locations to shape drug use practices and healthcare access. She is particularly interested in the role of housing, criminalization, and built environmental factors at impacting access to harm reduction interventions; the impact of the changing drug supply on drug use practices and health outcomes; gendered experiences of drug use and overdose risk; and the implementation and effectiveness of harm reduction and treatment interventions.

Before joining Brown, she received a BA in Anthropology and French from the University of Connecticut, and a MSc and PhD in Health Sciences from Simon Fraser University in Canada. During graduate school she conducted fieldwork in Sierra Leone and Canada and worked at the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use and the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

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