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Primary faculty

Whitney Irie

Associate Professor

MSW, PhD

Additional info:

Whitney C. Irie, MSW, PhD, is an implementation scientist whose research advances equitable sexual and reproductive health care, with a primary focus on Black women’s access to HIV prevention and other women’s health services. Her work is guided by a simple public health truth: When women are healthy, their families and communities are healthy. Irie examines how health systems, public health organizations, policy environments, clinical practice, and community context shape whether evidence-based interventions reach the people who could benefit from them most.

As principal investigator of the Irie Research Collective, also known as The Collective, Irie leads an interdisciplinary team that develops, evaluates, and translates strategies to improve sexual and reproductive health care, HIV prevention, and equitable public health practice. Irie’s research combines implementation science, stated-preference methods, community-engaged research, speculative design, and psychometric approaches to develop and evaluate strategies that improve access to preexposure prophylaxis, known as PrEP, and other prevention services. Across her work, she treats health disparities as the result of structural and organizational conditions rather than individual behavior, and she partners with communities, clinics, and public health organizations to design care models that are responsive, trustworthy, and sustainable.

Her current research portfolio includes studies focused on Black women’s preferences for PrEP access and HIV/STI prevention service delivery; rapid linkage-to-PrEP navigation in OB/GYN settings; provider education for Black women-centered sexual health care; AI-facilitated partner communication for PrEP; and the development of organizational tools to assess and strengthen the capacity of public health programs to deliver equitable services.

Before joining the Bursky School of Public Health, Irie was an assistant professor at Boston College School of Social Work, a lecturer in population medicine at Harvard Medical School, and research faculty at The Fenway Institute. She completed NIH-funded postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Population Medicine and earned her PhD at Washington University in St. Louis. She also serves as Associate Director of HIGH-IRI and as faculty for Afri-IRI, where she mentors investigators in implementation science across the United States and sub-Saharan Africa.

Areas of focus:

  • Implementation science 
  • Black women’s health 
  • HIV prevention and PrEP 
  • Sexual and reproductive health equity 
  • Community-engaged health systems research

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