Nabila El-Bassel

Dr. Nabila El-Bassel provides significant national and international leadership to the global health agenda. Dr. El-Bassel is a Professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work and Director of the Social Intervention Group (SIG), which was established in 1990 as a multi-disciplinary center focusing on developing and testing effective prevention and intervention approaches and disseminating them to local, national, and international communities. Dr. El-Bassel is also the Director of the Columbia University Global Health Research Center of Central Asia (GHRCCA), a team of faculty, scientists, researchers, and students in both New York and Central Asia committed to advancing solutions to health and social issues in Central Asia through Research, Education, Training, and Policy and Dissemination.

Dr. El-Bassel has been funded extensively by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.  She has designed and tested HIV intervention and prevention models for women, men, and couples, which have been disseminated nationally and internationally. Dr. El-Bassel has been studying the intersecting epidemics of HIV and violence against women and has designed HIV interventions that address these co-occurring problems with significant scientific contributions in gender-based HIV prevention for women.

Dr. El-Bassel has been mentoring HIV research scientists from Central Asia and she has also been funded by the National Institute of Health to train faculty and research scientists on the science of HIV intervention and prevention.  She has published extensively on HIV prevention science and on the co-occurring problems of IPV and substance abuse.

A bibliography of Dr. El-Bassel’s work is available here.

Research Interests:

Substance abuse
HIV/AIDS with women, men, couples, families
Partner violence with men and women on methadone
Social support
Social network interventions
Evidence-based practice
Health disparities
HIV and substance abuse research with people with history of criminal justice
International global health (HIV, substance abuse, HCV, TB, STIs etc.)
Migrant workers in Central Asia and China
Co-occurring problems: Violence, Trauma, Drug abuse and HIV
Training of racial ethnic minority researchers

Current Projects: