Shawnika Hull
Associate Professor of Communication
Faculty, PhD COM Faculty
Biography
Shawnika Hull's scholarship, teaching, and service are situated at the intersection of communication, public health, and health psychology with the goal of reducing health inequities through communication science. She applies communication as a tool to reduce health inequities through engaged scholarship that is focused on impacting the individual, social, and structural causes of health inequities in HIV. Hull collaborates with community and clinical partners to understand the factors that impede HIV prevention and develop programs, interventions, and campaigns to address them.
Hull has received funding for her research from institutional, foundation, and federal sources, including the Iris and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment, MAC AIDS and CDC, as well as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Loan Repayment Program. Hull was awarded a highly competitive NIH Mentored Research Scientist Development (K01) fellowship. Taken together, she has contributed expertise to grant awards totaling more than $3 million USD. She is an alumna of the Visiting Professors Program at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2020, Hull received the Board of Trustees Research and the Chancellor-Provost Award for Excellence in Community Engaged Scholarship at Rutgers University.
She is currently adapting an evidence-based HIV prevention intervention to include modern prevention tools (i.e., PrEP) and to bolster Black women's efficacy and skills for navigating partner and health system barriers to PrEP use. The adapted program, Sistas Informing Sistas About Topics on AIDS and PrEP (SISTA-P), has demonstrated acceptability and feasibility in pilot studies.
Education
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication