Emmanuel Kyagaba, Project Director
Emmanuel Kyagaba served as the Institutional Review Board (IRB) Chair for the Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) IRB for almost a decade. He is well familiar with the need to ensure the safety of vulnerable populations in research, as well as how to design a protocol that allows for asking culturally sensitive yet health imperative questions. For example, he was the IRB Chair while working with Dr. Ybarra to identify a protocol that allowed the inclusion of sensitive questions (e.g., about anal sex) and topics (e.g., condoms) in her CyberSenga research with Ugandan adolescents (R01MH080662). He will harness this experience in the current project by leading the efforts to obtain IRB approval at the local and national level. Indeed, Mr. Kyagaba has already begun the discussion with the current MUST IRB Chair, who is in support of the proposed research idea.
Mr. Kyagaba also has more than twenty years of professional experience as a trainer, researcher, and implementer of community mobilization through outreach activities, diagnostic/analytical surveys, project cycle management, and consultancy. As the Dean of Students at MUST, he also has extensive experience counseling young adults. Mr. Kyagaba is currently coordinating the HIV/AIDS policy implementation at MUST, including raising awareness, motivating behavior change, and supporting safe sex behavior. As the PI on the Internet Solutions for Kids Uganda subcontract and co-investigator on the project, Mr. Kyagaba will capitalizes on this prior experience to manage and guide the Ugandan research team.
Suzan Ansasira, Administrator and Director
Suzan Ansasira provides administrative support to the Internet Solutions for Kids Uganda team. This includes monitoring the budget, administering incentives, managing human resources issues, and coordinating with colleagues at the Center for Innovative Public Health Research about budgetary issues.
Michele Ybarra MPH PhD, Director
Dr. Ybarra is a recognized researcher in technology-related health issues for young people. She has published extensively in the areas of Internet harassment and other types of online victimization, health information seeking, and research methods as they relate to technology. She also has developed and tested multiple technology-based behavior change programs both domestically and internationally. Current projects include a national longitudinal survey of youth that aims to identify youth characteristics related to the emergence of sexual violence over time (R01 CE001543; R01 HD083072); the development and testing of a text messaging-based teen pregnancy prevention program for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and other sexual minority teen women (TP2AH000035); and the development and testing of an HIV prevention program for young adults across Uganda (R34 MH109296).
Past projects include the development and testing of Guy2Guy, a text messaging-based HIV prevention program for gay, bisexual, and queer teen men in the United States (R01MH096660); CyberSenga, an Internet-based HIV prevention program for adolescents in Mbarara, Uganda (R01 MH080662); a national survey that endeavored to better understand the positive and negative experiences of LGBT and non-LGBT youth online via a national survey (R01HD057191); the development and testing of a text messaging-based smoking cessation program among young adults in the United States (R21CA135669) and adult smokers in Turkey (R01TW007918); as well as a longitudinal study to examine the associations between exposure to violent new media and seriously violent behavior (U49 CE000206).
Dr. Ybarra holds a doctorate in child mental health services research and evaluation from the department of mental health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She was a pre-doctoral fellow of the National Institutes of Mental Health and was a joint fellow of the American Schools of Public Health / Centers for Disease Control.