Meet our researchers

“PHRU has a good reputation and a relation with the community that has been brought up over many years so it’s in a good position to do really exciting work. I think things can be done here that would be difficult to do in some other places.”

- Gavin Robertson,
Project Director, Project ACCEPT

Gavin Roberston, M.Ed
Project Director, Project ACCEPT

Gavin Robertson’s office sits sandwhiched between the administrative offices of Project ACCEPT and the dispatch office that coordinates the teams of community outreach workers conducting the project. The hallway is a constant buzz of activity—particularly when outreach teams are on their way in from the field—laughter and stories from the day filling the tight space.

As Project Director, Robertson oversees the Soweto site for Project ACCEPT, a large community randomised trial investigating the impact on HIV incidence of a community-based HIV counselling and testing intervention. “Establishing that connection between behavioural research and biological markers, disease and incidence is really important.” Speaking about the community in which the project is conducted, Robertson relates, “We constantly keep them informed and involve the community in what it is that we’re doing. And we have a presence there as well. People are familiar with the project, familiar with the organization. There’s an openness.”

A social scientist working in the area of HIV prevention research, Robertson returned to his childhood home of Johannesburg in 2004 to work with PHRU before taking a leave to oversee clinical trial research at the Infectious Disease Institute in Kampala, Uganda. Now returned, Robertson has an appreciation for how the organization has grown and changed over the past several years, “I think it’s an exciting organization, a vibrant organization. It’s constantly shifting and changing and redefining itself and the work that it does. It’s constantly adjusting to what the dynamics of the epidemic are and to what kind of research is happening. And for such a large organization to be able to do that is actually quite remarkable.”

Juggling his roles with Project ACCEPT, a study of multiple concurrent sexual partnerships and a randomised controlled trial of an intervention for couples, Robertson—a trained psychologist—turns to yoga to keep himself balanced. He laughs, “It keeps me sane.”

Education
M.Ed (Ed. Psych.) University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa