(Uh-RAY-uh-sir-e-Kool)

Sean Valenzuela Arayasirikul, PhD (they/them). As a Medical Sociologist, my work is focused on the social etiology of inequities in health - in particular, how oppression, stigma, discrimination and violence impact the health of sexual and gender minoritized communities of color. I also examine entanglements of technology in society, its role in constructing emerging conceptions of health, illness and identity, and as a means to disrupt pathways that lead to negative health outcomes. I was an National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) T32 Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Alcohol Research Group, UC Berkeley. I was named an American Sociological Association Minority Fellow (Cohort 38). I served as the Health Literacy and Health Policy Fellow at the United States Department of Health & Human Services (DHHS) and as a Scholar at the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). In Washington, D.C., I oversaw mobile health and HIV testing initiatives at Whitman-Walker Health and was a mobile HIV Case Manager for newly diagnosed HIV-positive youth in Los Angeles County. Deeply committed to adolescent health, I have represented youth communities in HIV community planning processes as a member of the HIV Prevention Planning Committees in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Currently, I am an Associate Professor In Residence at the University of California, Irvine, and an Associate Director of the University of California Global Health Initiative (UCGHI) Center for Gender and Health Justice (CGHJ). I am also an affiliated Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Public Health Research (https://centerforphresearch.org) and the Trans Research Unit for Equity (https://truesf.org/) at the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

My research portfolio spans the gamut of public health, digital health communication, and health services research from large, community-based, social epidemiologic studies to intervention development and the science of implementing mobile health (mHealth) interventions and digital technologies in and across various social systems - community-based, clinical, public health, local, and national settings. I develop, implement, and test digital health care navigation interventions and systems to better extend the reach of health care and public health services to hardly reached, minoritized communities in diverse socio-politico-cultural contexts such as San Francisco, CA, New Orleans, LA, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This work leverages motivational interviewing, text messaging, and ecological momentary assessments/interventions to build and strengthen a digital safety net to better serve sexual and gender minorities of color; it also explores new models of accountability and shared governance among community, health, governmental, legal, and other social institutions to create a culture of health.

My goal is to not only uncover the breadth and depth of social problems, but to also bring about social action and change, reimagining what an intersectional, anti-oppression, emancipatory, public health praxis looks like and how we can achieve liberation. Deeply committed to the training and mentorship of sexual and gender minoritized scholars in the public health sciences, I am the Principal Investigator of the first NIH-funded, undergraduate training program for HIV prevention science and trans and nonbinary scholarship (https://weshinestrong.org/).

I am a child of immigrants, a 2nd generation Thai American. As a genderqueer youth, I survived homelessness and was raised working poor. I earned my Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco and my dissertation research examined social inequity among trans women in the San Francisco Bay Area at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. I am a proud member of the House and Ball Community (HBC). I served as the San Francisco Father of the Iconic House of Infiniti and am a member of the Iconic Pioneering House of Saint Laurent. I walk Best Dressed and other fashion categories and contribute to national organizing and mobilization efforts as a Planning Committee Member of #HouseLivesMatter (https://houselivesmatter.org/). With my husband and puppy at my side, I am on a journey to disrupt social unevenness, think resistance into reality, and change the material conditions that weigh each and every one of us down, but especially the vulnerable, minoritized and othered.

disrupt. think. change.