The Drexel University School of Public Health recently hired Seth Welles, ScD, PhD as an associate professor in the school’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Dr. Welles is a leading researcher in HIV disease progression and transmission, and has more than a decade of experience teaching epidemiology at all levels.
For 15 years, he has focused on understanding the impact of HIV phenotypic and genotypic antiretroviral drug resistance on HIV pathogenesis and transmission. Part of this time was spent as an epidemiologist and senior statistician for the Statistical and Data Analysis Center for the national AIDS Clinical Trials Group at Harvard University.
At the Drexel University School of Public Health, Dr. Welles will continue his leading research on HIV, advise students interested in HIV and infectious diseases, and develop advanced curriculum to support the school’s new Doctor of Philosophy in Epidemiology (PhD) program.
Dr. Welles joins Drexel University from the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), where he served as an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and as the director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Public Health Research program. Dr. Welles also taught introductory and advanced courses in epidemiologic methods at the University of Minnesota, University of New Hampshire and other schools.
In addition to his teaching experience, Dr. Welles is committed to community-based participatory research and has a demonstrated interest in working with marginalized populations. Accordingly, Dr. Welles has studied psychosocial risk for HIV infection and STDs among sexual minority adults and adolescents. He has conducted random surveys of sexual minority adults at community festivals and at health-clinics to assess demographic and psychosocial determinants of sexual risk-taking and HIV/STD infections and has recently developed Internet-based and audio-Computer-Assisted Interviewing (A-CASI) technologies for recruitment and data collection in sexual minority populations.
His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).