Crystal F. Lewis, PhD

As the Laurie M. Tisch Scholar for Racial Equity in Mental Health, I have dedicated my research career to community-engaged research centered on identifying and dismantling disparities among minoritized communities, particularly among those heavily burdened with illicit substance use and related morbidities (HIV, HCV, and mental illness).  For over 2 decades, my research has focused on harm reduction interventions and in partnership with minority-owned independent pharmacies as frontline public health providers to help address cultural and structural barriers to prevention and treatment services - PHARM-Link Studies. Expertise in the study of neighborhood-level socioeconomic conditions, social networks, and various forms of discrimination and stigma (interpersonal and structural) has been refined overtime and specifically through research exploring direct access to biomedical HIV prevention services in pharmacies (iPEPcare Study), harm reduction access that leverages various forms of technology (WebHealth4Us Study), and most recently, linking persons with opioid use disorder to a pharmacy-based virtual buprenorphine clinic packaged with overdose prevention, and HIV services (PHARM-Link/VBC+ Study).

As one of the leaders in creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive Department, I have assembled research faculty with intentional health equity research interests in the Department of Psychiatry to create a Disparities Research Collaborative (DRC) to support manuscript development, a grant development ‘think tank’, faculty and student mentoring, and applied research opportunities for residents, fellows, graduate students, and medical students.

Also supporting equity-focused research is my appointed with New York State Office of Mental Health (NYS OMH) as a Division Head at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, overseeing the Division of Social Solutions & Services Research. In this role, I direct the Center for Research on Cultural and Structural Equity in Behavioral Health (CCASE), one of two Centers of Excellence funded by NYS OMH mandated to provide research, evaluation and training dedicated to addressing racial inequity in mental health services. An example of a prominent CCASE project has been the design and delivery of a theoretically grounded and applied Cultural & Structural Humility (CSH) training for the NYS mental health services workforce (and other related institutional workforces) with accompanying evaluations to reveal evidence of practice transformation.