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Excerpt
Sevgi Aral was born in Turkey to a remarkable family where her mother, now 80 years old, was a physician. Sevgi trained in Turkey, University of Pennsylvania, and Emory, in disciplines of Psychology, Demography, and Sociology and finally obtained her PhD in Sociology, Social Psychology. She came to the CDC in 1978 to begin a career in STD Research and by 1993 became Associate Director for Science for the Division of STD Prevention. She has served in the role of mentor for both trainees and colleagues needing help with social science perspective bridging the gap between clinical epidemiology and behavior. One of Sevgi's traits in leadership and effectiveness in interdisciplinary research is based in her ability to ask "the key question" that is at the core of her varied researches.
Her second most important achievement is to be the most successful of social/behavioral scientists in the STD/HIV field in bringing together behavioral and epidemiologic research. For example, expanding behavioral data to include STD history in national surveys; linking behavioral data to objective biomedical data; and with Tom Peterman, calling for linkage of behavioral interventions to objective biomedical outcomes, emphasizing the need for RCT. In this sense she has led a paradigm shift in behavior research on STD/HIV (not an easy or always popular thing to do).
Her specific achievements in 115 publications, so far, have focused on not only individuals but also on demographic and sociocultural RF for STD. Her latest example, published in 1998 with the late Jonathan Mann, calls for another paradigm shift in the public health approach to STD (modeled after the UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo), which emphasizes going beyond traditional public health approaches, identifies human rights violations (e.g., trafficking in sex workers) that create vulnerability to STD.
