STUDY PROTOCOL article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Life-Course Epidemiology and Social Inequalities in Health
This article is part of the Research TopicSubstance Use Research and Population HealthView all 9 articles
Understanding Social Context in HIV and Drug Use via Community-Informed Computational Modeling: SILOS Study Protocol
Provisionally accepted
Joshua Z. Stadlan1
Patrick F. Janulis1Tom C. Wolff1Kathryn Risher2
Jonathan Ozik3,4,5
Sara P. Rimer3,4,6Elizabeth A. McConnell7
Darnell Motley8
Gregory Phillips II1Kate Banner1Joshua Melville1Caden Buckhalt1Emily Esposito1
Michelle A. Birkett1*- 1Department of Medical Social Sciences, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, United States
- 2Department of Public Health Sciences, Penn State University College of Medicine, Hershey, PA, United States
- 3Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, United States
- 4Northwestern-Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering, Evanston, United States
- 5The University of Chicago Department of Public Health Sciences, Chicago, United States
- 6Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering (CASE) at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States
- 7Department of Psychology, Palo Alto University, Palo Alto, United States
- 8University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States
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Introduction: Racial, ethnic, and sexual and gender minority populations are disproportionately impacted by HIV and other infectious diseases. A rigorous and holistic view of how individual and complex factors interact to produce health disparities among minority populations is urgently necessary. Methods: This project seeks to understand the social and contextual systems around the most marginalized HIV-impacted populations by investigating how differences in access to people and places confer HIV risk. Specifically, we have planned an innovative observational study across five U.S. cities, administering in-depth remote network surveys to 2,700 racially diverse young men who have sex with men and transgender women. The data captured will be used to develop simulation models of city-specific synthetic populations to examine how differences in the people and places populations have access to pools risk within marginalized populations and increases their disparities in HIV. Results: The study was awarded in August 2024 but has paused since March 2025 due to the NIH's termination of the study just prior to the start of participant recruitment. The future of the work is currently unclear as we pursue multiple avenues for reinstatement. Discussion Drawing upon both our expertise in network modeling and our strong community partnerships, this project remains poised to transform scientific understanding of the structural drivers of health inequity.
Keywords: HIV, Sexual networks, social networks, Participatory modeling, race/ethnicity, disparities, systems science, social determinants of health
Received: 22 Aug 2025; Accepted: 07 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Stadlan, Janulis, Wolff, Risher, Ozik, Rimer, McConnell, Motley, Phillips II, Banner, Melville, Buckhalt, Esposito and Birkett. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Michelle A. Birkett, birkett@northwestern.edu
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