Pilot Awards Recipient: Sara Glick, PhD, MPH

Young men who have sex with men (MSM) - and young African American MSM, in particular, are among the only U.S. populations to continue to experience an increase in HIV incidence, yet the reasons for this risk remain unclear. Few data exist on how MSM form patterns of sexual behavior, how those patterns change over a person's life, and which patterns most influence HIV risk. Moreover, our methodologies for studying and understanding HIV risk early in the sexual life course remain underdeveloped. Given the challenges of identifying and recruiting young MSM, there have been relatively few cohort studies that specifically enrolled this population to prospectively describe sexual risk patterns. To that end, we propose a pilot study to assess the feasibility conducting the prospective research among young MSM in Washington, DC (DC) and begin to describe the early sexual experiences of this population.