Vickie Mays, PhD, MSPH

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Professor/Director
UCLA Center for Research, Education, Training and Strategic Communication on Minority Health Disparities
Co-Director of Black C.A.R.E.
405 Hilgard Avenue
1285 Franz Hall, Box 951563
Los Angeles, California 90095-1563
Phone: (310) 206-5159
Fax: (310) 206-5895
mays@ucla.edu

Dr. Vickie Mays, a Clinical Psychologist, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles has worked in the field of HIV/AIDS since the mid 1980s. She was one of the first in the field to direct attention to the impact of HIV/AIDS in the African American community with an article published in 1987. In 1988, she wrote one of the first critical examinations of the impact of AIDS on African American and Latina women, which by its citation count, has become an influential article in the field. In 1988, through the Vermont Primary Prevention Meeting, she convened the top behavioral scientists in the field and published the first behavioral science book on primary prevention of HIV/AIDS, which included articles on Native American and Asian/Pacific Islanders who previously had been ignored.

As a researcher, policy advocate and clinician, Dr. Mays' HIV research is shaped by three themes reflecting her interests in furthering empirically based research on underserved ethnic minority communities and women infected and affect by HIV/AIDS: 1) determining factors that contribute to ill physical and mental health and disease in women and ethnic minorities; 2) developing and guiding policy development pertinent to changing these conditions; and 3) developing new methodologies to advance the development of science that is responsive to the health and mental health care needs of ethnic minority women and gay men of color, in particular.

Content last updated September 19, 2008.