For the past year, Dr. Collins has served as the Acting Director for the National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She has served for four years as Deputy Director for the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. During her 15 years at CDC, she has also served as Chief of the Surveillance and Evaluation Research Branch as well as Acting Director for the Division of Adolescent and School Health and Acting Director for the Division of Nutrition and Physical Activity.

Dr. Collins has a longstanding commitment to adolescent health, and her interests span research, program, and policy issues. Much of her work has focused on the surveillance of adolescent health-risk behaviors and the development and evaluation of school-based programs to prevent tobacco use, poor nutrition, physical inactivity, and sexual risk behaviors among youth.

Dr. Caldwell is a professor of recreation, park and tourism management at Penn State University. Her research emanates from a prevention framework that focuses on developing youth competencies and healthy leisure, thereby reducing risky behavior in leisure. She was principal on two research projects funded by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, including the development and evaluation of TimeWise: Taking Charge of Leisure Time.

Dr. Caldwell has also worked with colleagues at Penn State and the University of the Western Cape and Cape Town University to develop and evaluate the HealthWise South Africa: Life Skills for Adolescents curriculum, which is being delivered and evaluated in Cape Town, South Africa. She has co-edited a book on youth development through recreation which is in press.

Currently Dr. Caldwell sits on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Association of Leisure Studies. She is the secretary of the Children and Youth working group of the World Leisure Association. In 2001 she was the recipient of the National Therapeutic Recreation Association Professional Research Award and also inducted into the Academy of Leisure Sciences. In 2005, she received the Allen V. Sapora Research Award for excellence in research.

Douglas Kirby, PhD, is a Senior Research Scientist at ETR Associates in Scotts Valley, California. For more than 25 years, he has directed statewide or nationwide studies of adolescent sexual behavior, abstinence-only programs, sexuality and HIV education programs, school-based clinics, school condom-availability programs and youth development programs. He co-authored research on the Reducing the Risk, Safer Choices, and Draw the Line curricula, all of which significantly reduced unprotected sex, either by delaying sex, reducing the number of partners, increasing condom use, or increasing contraceptive use among participants.

Dr. Kirby has painted a more comprehensive and detailed picture of the risk and protective factors associated with adolescent sexual behavior, contraceptive use, and pregnancy, and has identified important common characteristics of effective sexuality education and HIV education programs. In 2001, he authored Emerging Answers: Research Findings on Programs to Reduce Teen Pregnancy, which has been widely acclaimed. Over the years, he has also authored or co-authored more than 100 volumes, articles and chapters on adolescent sexual behavior and programs designed to change that behavior. These have included reviews of the field for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and others.

Currently Dr. Kirby is reviewing the effectiveness of sex and HIV education programs in the developing world and is studying the factors leading to the decline of HIV prevalence in Uganda. During the Summer Training Institute, Dr. Kirby will represent Richard P. Barth, MSW, PhD. who developed Reducing the Risk.

Dr. Flavio Francisco Marsiglia received his PhD in 1991 from the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. Since 1994, he has been a member of the faculty of the Arizona State University School of Social Work where he is currently the Distinguished Foundation Professor of Cultural Diversity and Health and the Director of the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center (SIRC). SIRC is one of seven social work research centers in the nation funded by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIH/NIDA).

In addition, Dr. Marsiglia is the Principal Investigator of other NIH/NIDA-and CDC funded research projects studying risk and protective factors associated with health outcomes among Mexican/Mexican American and Native American youth and their families.

Dr. Marsiglia is the lead instructor for the Diversity and Oppression in the Social Work Context course sequence. He has published more than 30 manuscripts in his areas of specialization and has coauthored with Stephen Kulis a forthcoming book entitled Culturally Grounded Social Work.

Dr. Marsiglia and his SIRC colleagues have presented their research findings at conferences across the nation and at international conferences in numerous countries including Mexico, Canada, Uruguay, Spain, and Italy. Two of his current studies are been conducted in partnership with Mexican and Spanish universities. Dr. Marsiglia co-authored the evidence-based curriculum Keepin' It REAL: Drug Resistance Strategies.

Mary Harthun has been an educator and teacher trainer for 38 years, working in a variety of capacities in schools. She began her teaching career in Michigan in 1968 and moved to Arizona in 1969 where she currently lives. She has taught French, English, and ESL, served as a department chair of Foreign Languages for 18 years, and then moved into staff development. For the past 20 years, she has helped to design and implement programs to train teachers, paraprofessional educators, and school administrators in the U.S and Mexico. In addition, she has served on a number of program evaluation teams for grant-funded projects in Arizona and throughout the Southwest. After "officially" retiring from the Phoenix Union High School District in 2000, she continues to consultant on Title I and district-wide staff development projects.

Ms. Harthun has worked with the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center (SIRC) since 1998 as the Teacher Trainer and Curriculum Development Specialist for the Drug Resistance Strategies (DRS) Project, a grant funded from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and sponsored by The Pennsylvania State University. She facilitated the development of three distinct versions of the 7th grade Keepin' it REAL curriculum and the 8th grade Keepin' it REAL Booster activities. She also worked with ETR when it became the publisher of the Multicultural version of the 7th grade Keepin' it REAL curriculum.

Under the current DRS grant, Ms. Harthun has lead the development of the two 5th grade versions of the Keepin' it REAL curriculum as well as booster activities for 6th grade. She has presented at many conferences and published several articles related to her work with the project.

Dr. Janet S. St. Lawrence is Chief of the Behavioral Interventions and Research Branch. She completed the Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in 1980, followed by a post-doctoral year as Chief Resident in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of Mississippi Medical Center from 1980-81. From 1981-1987, she was a professor at the University of Mississippi with a joint appointment at the medical center and then moved to Jackson State University.

Dr. St. Lawrence has received numerous awards and recognition: The Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy's Outstanding Research Award; NAFEO's National Research Award, and the Mississippi Psychological Association's Research Achievement Award (twice), and Outstanding Teaching of Psychology award. Her research career focused on developing and evaluating STD/HIV risk reduction interventions (including Becoming A Responsible Teen), primarily in community settings, with grant funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute on Drug Abuse, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. St. Lawrence developed and evaluated an adolescent intervention that became one of the CDC Division of Adolescent and School Health's five national model 'Programs that Work.' While in clinical practice from 1980-1996, her practice specialized in individuals and families who were living with HIV/AIDS. She served on the National Institute of Mental Health's Immunology and AIDS study section that reviewed NIH grant applications and on CDC's Behavioral Science Peer Review Panel in 1994. She is the author of more that 200 books, book chapters, and articles in professional journals.