Meet The Director
Dr. Brian Rivers is a Professor and Director of the Cancer Health Equity Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM). Dr. Rivers is nationally and internationally recognized as a leader in health disparities research and a retired member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Advisory Council on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NACMHD). Dr. Rivers is an active member in the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) community and serves in several ledership capacities. Dr. Rivers is a behavioral scientist with a broad background in implementation science and public health, with specific training and expertise in methodologies commonly used to addressing health disparitiesTo date, Dr. Rivers has secured more than $30 million in extramural funding through NIH. The goal of Dr. Rivers program of research is to contribute to advancing cancer health equity. More specifically, Dr. Rivers research portfolio has endeavored to expand the application of population-based intervention science to understand how to address cancer health disparities in clinical and community-based settings, using multi-level approaches, such as medical mobile apps and/or Community Health Workers/Patient Navigators.
Currently, Dr. Rivers is leading several large randomized controlled trials, funded by Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and NIH National Institute on Minority Health and Health (NIMHD R01, to evaluate and characterize app usage and acceptability for education and care coordination among African American men diagnosed with prostate cancer. Dr. Rivers is a Multiple-Principal Investigator for the NIH National Cancer Institute (NCI) funded PACHE U54 Cancer Research Partnership between MSM, Tuskegee University, and the University of Alabama-Birmingham O’Neil Comprehensive Cancer Center (UAB CCC). Dr. Rivers also serves as the Director of the Integrating Special Populations Core of the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) funded Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance. Dr. Rivers has over 350 scientific communications and his work has been presented in a diverse settings including the First Congress on Oncolgy Clinical Trials (Lagos, Nigeria), Movember International Prostate Cancer Consortium (Queensland, Australia), The Atlantic Magazine, The People vs Cancer, South by Southwest (SXSW) conferences, and the National Press Foundation.
