Phillip W. Schnarrs, Ph.D.

Phillip W. Schnarrs received his Ph.D. in Health Behavior with training in community-based participatory research from Indiana University School of Public Health at Bloomington and is currently Director of The Texas PRIDE Health Collaborative and Associate Professor of Community-Based Participatory Research at Dell Medical School, UT Austin. Prior to coming to Dell Med, Dr. Schnarrs was an assistant professor at The University of Texas at San Antonio. For more than a decade, Dr. Schnarrs' work has focused broadly on the health and wellbeing on sexual and gender diverse people, including improving accessing to healthcare. During his graduate study and early in his career, Phillip's research examined sexual health and behaviors among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men and transgender women, in particular HIV testing and biomedical HIV prevention. Dr. Schnarrs currently has funding from Merck to study preferences for longer-acting PrEP formulations in transgender and gender diverse Texans (NCT05044286).

From 2017 - 2020 Dr. Schnarrs was an Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Fellow with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and his work began to shift towards studying the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and mental health is sexual and gender diverse populations. Dr. Schnarrs' research in this area seeks to understand the role of sexual and gender minority specific adverse childhood experiences on mental and behavioral health outcomes and the impact of other factors such as discrimination and social support on this relationship. Most recently, Dr. Schnarrs has begun to look at the impact of exposure to ACEs on HIV testing, biomedical HIV prevention, and HIV-related outcomes (e.g., ART adherence and viral load). Phillip is a Co-PI on a study examining the effect of childhood adversity on ART adherence and viral load using CFAR Network of Integrated Clinical Systems (CNICS) data.

Currently, his work has begun to determine how best to leverage social support and social network interventions to improve mental health and access to HIV status neutral care. With collaborators at UT Southwestern and Texas Health Institute, Dr. Schnnarrs was awarded $5.4 million from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute for a comparative effectiveness trial that will determine whether a motivational interviewing intervention or a motivational interviewing + social support intervention works best for reducing suicidal ideation in sexual and gender diverse young adults in primary care settings. His team with collaborators at the University of Southern California and The University of Queensland are currently working to develop a social network intervention to increase HIV self-testing in young men who have sex with men.

Dr. Schnarrs is also a current board member for Texas PRIDE Impact Funds and Every Body Texas, and a 2021-2022 Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project. He also continues to lead efforts across the state to increase infrastructure and build capacity to engage in LGBTQ+ health research through the Texas People-centered Research, Intervention Design and Evaluation in Health Collaborative.