The BEGIN Lab

The Behavioral Economics and Global Health Insights (BEGIN Lab) – co-directed by Dr. Alison Buttenheim and Dr. Harsha Thirumurthy – continues to expand its program of research on behavioral, structural, and policy interventions that improve health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. In addition to three large, ongoing NIH-supported research projects that are studying interventions to reduce the risk of HIV in high prevalence settings such as Kenya and South Africa, the Lab recently launched two exciting 5-year research projects that are also supported by NIH.

The PROTECT study in South Africa will evaluate communication strategies to reduce young women’s vulnerability to misinformation about HIV vaccines that may become available in the years ahead. The study seeks to identify effective ways of reducing the spread of misinformation about HIV vaccines in the future.

Another project – the Innovative Behavioral Intervention Strategies study – is a multi-country study that will be one of the first megastudies of behavioral interventions in low- and middle-income countries. The study will test multiple interventions to promote HIV testing in Kenya and Uganda. The BEGIN Lab has also embarked on several new collaborations focusing on non-communicable diseases in the Global South with recent publications examining the care cascade for diabetes and hypertension in India.