Antonio Jimenez, PhD

Dr. Jimenez has over thirty years of qualitative research experience in Chicago area communities exploring issues that impact persons who use drugs (PWUD) and other marginalized sub-populations. Currently he serve as Director of the Community Outreach Intervention Projects (COIP), located in the UIC School of Public Health. In this role Dr. Jimenez oversees all activities at five community-based research and service field offices, and two mobile units. He also currently serve as Co-investigator on the NIH-funded ROMI (Reducing Opioid Mortality in Illinois) study, examining a paired peer recovery coach and case manager (PRC-CM) intervention for PWUD with recent carceral involvement. He is the Co-Principal Investigator and Project Ethnographer for the Chicago team of the CDC National HIV Behavioral Surveillance (NHBS), a program that conducts the annual sentinel surveillance of HIV and related risk behaviors among PWID and other populations at risk of infection. Prior to this he served as the Principal Investigator for the Cook County Opioid Data2Action Qualitative Needs Assessment, a study to gain insight into opioid use in and overdose risks in suburban Cook County municipalities, as a Co-Investigator for the CDC-funded HCV Testing, Case Management & Linkage to Care Among Persons Who Inject Drugs Initiative which assessed a service delivery model that provided HCV testing, case management, and linking to care, to PWUD, and have directly supervised research activities for nearly every COIP study that involved interventions, survey and biospecimen collection, and participant follow-up over multiple years.