Laura Nyblade

Dr. Laura Nyblade is a public health expert specializing in research on stigma and discrimination. She has over two decades of experience in health research, instrument development, program design and evaluation, intervention development and implementation, and translation of research findings for rapid utilization by program implementers and policy makers. As an RTI Fellow and Senior Stigma and Discrimination Technical Advisor, she brings her expertise to address conditions with a longer history of stigma research (e.g., HIV) to conditions newer to stigma research and intervention (e.g., hearing loss and cancer). 

Dr. Nyblade’s has led projects supported by federal agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and she has provided technical guidance on stigma-reduction programming to the U.K. Department for International Development, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the World Health Organization and the World Bank. In addition, she has partnered with civil societies and ministries of health across sub–Saharan Africa, South and South-East Asia, and the Caribbean to design, implement, and evaluate evidence-based HIV stigma reduction programs, reaching affected communities, health care professionals, clients, and policymakers.  

Dr. Nyblade has established innovative programmatic tools to engage multiple audiences and support improved policies to reduce stigma and discrimination for populations that are marginalized. While much of her stigma and discrimination-reduction related efforts have been in low- and middle-income countries, she has begun adapting and evaluating the same tools in the United States. She is also examining stigma across health conditions in response to the multitude of stigmas that exist and impact individuals’ health and well-being.  She has conducted research on breast and cervical cancer stigma in India and is working with researchers in Zambia to integrate stigma research into an implementation science study to improve cancer prevention and treatment among people living with HIV. She is co-chair of a stigma sub-working group of the Lancet commission on hearing loss and has led a team that has developed and preliminary validated measures of d/Deaf and hard of hearing stigma.   

Most recently, Dr. Nyblade has led the development of the Total Facility Approach to Stigma Reduction to support health facilities in improving access to prevention and treatment services, as well as client quality of care and health outcomes for people living with HIV, gender and sexual minorities, people who use substances and adolescent girls and young women. She is currently working with colleagues to explore, adapt, and test this approach to address structural racism in HIV clinics in the United States. 

Outside of her research, she has contributed to many advisory committees on stigma in her career and is currently a member of the UNAIDS task team for the development of summary measures on stigma, discrimination, and an enabling policy environment for effective HIV responses. From 2019-2021, Dr. Nyblade served as Scientific Co-Chair for the NIH short-term Stigma Research Training Institute, run by the Center for Global Health Studies at the Fogarty International Center. Her insights have been featured in publications and enhanced by her participation in seminars and conferences held around the world. She has also spent time mentoring the next generation of researchers, fulfilling term appointments at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and serving on doctoral candidate’s dissertation committees. Dr. Nyblade is an associate editor for Stigma and Health.

Before joining RTI in 2011, Dr. Nyblade served as Director of Stigma, Discrimination, and Gender at the International Center for Research on Women.