Curt G. Beckwith, MD, FACP, FIDSA, is a Professor of Medicine and Interim Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and Lifespan-affiliated hospitals. He conducts research on developing innovative HIV testing, linkage, and retention programs for vulnerable populations, particularly for substance users and persons involved with the justice system. He has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse since 2007. He is the PI of the Collaborative Justice-Involved Research and Training Program on Substance Use and HIV at Brown University Health, Associate Director of the Providence/Boston Center for AIDS Research, and Director of the Community Engaged Research Core of the COBRE on Opioids and Overdose. In addition, Dr. Beckwith serves on the Department of Health and Human Services Antiretroviral Guidelines Committee, and he is an infectious diseases clinician at The Miriam Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital.

Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Duke University. She is a national expert in examining how the criminal legal system impacts people, families, and communities. During the pandemic, she co-founded the COVID Prison Project, one of the only national data projects that tracks and analyzes COVID testing, cases, and deaths in prison systems across the country. She utilized the infrastructure of the COVID Prison Project to recently launch the Third City Project—a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded big data project that tracks and aggregates publicly available health and health policy data from carceral systems. Additionally, Dr. Brinkley-Rubinstein is the PI of several NIH and foundation grants focused on substance use, HIV prevention, and mortality. In 2019, she co-edited a special issue of AJPH that explored how mass incarceration is a socio-structural determinant of health and more recently was invited by the National Academy of Medicine to attend its Annual Emerging Leaders Forum. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, CNN, Science Magazine, and other media outlets. Her work blends research and policy, which has recently culminated in providing expert consultation to Congress relevant to prison standards and data reporting.

Brandon Marshall, PhD, is a professor of the Department of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health. He is also founding director of the People, Place & Health Collective at Brown University. Dr. Marshall’s research focuses on substance use epidemiology, with a specific emphasis on harm reduction and overdose prevention. He is passionate about conducting research that improves the health and well-being of people who use drugs

Dr. Alysse Wurcel works clinically and on research to improve the quality of care delivered to people who use drugs and people who are incarcerated. She is an Infectious Diseases doctor at Boston Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. Following medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, she did internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, and ID fellowship at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and Tufts Medical Center. Dr. Wurcel provides HIV and HCV care at five county jails in eastern MA. Since spring 2020, she has worked as an ID liaison to the Massachusetts Sheriffs Association. She received funding from the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality to improve HCV testing access in jails and from NIDA to develop improved systems of status-neutral HIV care in jails. She is the Chair-Elect of the Academic Consortium on Criminal Justice Health and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Correctional Health Care.

Dr. Melissa Zielinski is a tenured associate professor and clinical psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences with nationally-recognized expertise in community-engaged implementation science research and practice in carceral settings. In her faculty role, she directs both her own large research team (the Health and the Legal System [HEALS] Research, Practice, and Policy Lab) and also UAMS’ NIDA-funded T32 “Translational Training in Addiction” program. She also previously served as an Associate Director of UAMS’ Community Engagement Core.

Dr. Zielinski focuses her work on interventions to reduce the burden of traumatic stress exposure and sequelae on individuals and communities—particularly people who use drugs, have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and/or are incarcerated. She has worked extensively with legal settings such as prisons, drug treatment courts, jails, and reentry centers on implementation of evidence-based therapies for trauma and PTSD as a path to promote addiction recovery. She has also done concentrated research and practice work at the intersection of incarceration and pregnancy, including co-founding Growing Together, Arkansas’ first program aimed at supporting the health of incarcerated women during the perinatal period. Her work has been funded by a variety of agencies including multiple active research project grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Dr. Zielinski is also active in disseminating education on traumatic stress and has served as education production committee chair for the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies since 2019. She also serves on the board of directors for the Academic Consortium on Criminal Justice Health and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

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