People

Ijeoma Opara is an Associate Professor of Public Health in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Yale School of Public Health. Dr. Opara is also the director of The Substance Abuse and Sexual Health (SASH) lab (www.oparalab.org) and a faculty fellow in the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at Yale. Dr. Opara’s research focuses on HIV/AIDS, HCV, and substance use prevention among adolescents of color and highlighting racial-gender specific protective factors among Black adolescent girls. She primarily uses strengths-based approaches in her work to highlight resiliency, empowerment, and cultural strengths in ethnic minority families and their role in prevention.

Dr. Opara is a former NIDA T-32 pre-doctoral fellow in the Behavioral Sciences Training in Drug Abuse Research program at NYU Meyers College of Nursing from 2018-2019. This award supported her dissertation research, which examined protective factors for sexual risk behavior and drug use among Black and Hispanic girls living in Paterson, NJ.

Dr. Opara was named the 2020 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award recipient which funds her project on neighborhoods impact on substance use and mental health among urban youth in Paterson, NJ for the next five years. More information about Dr. Opara’s grant can be found at: https://commonfund.nih.gov/earlyindependence/awardrecipients

Principal Investigator, Integrating Community Based Participatory Research and Machine Learning Methods to Predict Youth Substance Use Disorders for Urban Cities in New Jersey. Completed

Principal Investigator, Understanding the Role of Neighborhoods on Urban Youth’s Substance Use and Mental Health: A Community-Based Substance Abuse Prevention Project. Completed

Asabor E, Opara I (2026).
“An HIV Free Generation”: A qualitative inquiry into mapping intersectional discourses of preexposure prophylaxis for women among female nurses in rural South Africa
Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, 37 (2), 214-226. doi: 10.1097/JNC.0000000000000583.

Opara I, Weerakoon S, Saeed G, Duran-Becerra B, Pagan C (2026).
Qualitative exploration of neighborhoods, youth substance misuse, and mental health in an urban community
Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology [Epub 2026 Feb 20]. doi: 10.1080/15374416.2026.2617211.

Opara I, Brooks-Stephens JR, Asabor EN, Banya M, Metzger I (2026).
“Hear our voices”: A qualitative exploration of mental health among Black girls
Children and Youth Services Review, 181, 108721. doi: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2025.108721.

Weerakoon SM, Henson-Garcia M, Rose R, Lindsay J, Srikanth N, Opara I (2025).
Racial self-efficacy and ethnic identity in the context of neighborhood violence and internalizing symptoms among Black and Latinx youth: An application of the minority stress theory
Community Health Equity Research and Policy [Epub 2025 Dec 3]. doi: 10.1177/2752535X251406670.

Opara I, Metzger IW, Pham C, Boyd DT (2025).
The application of intersectionality theory in family-based substance use prevention for urban Black adolescents
Journal of Family Theory and Review, 17 (4), 910-921. doi: 10.1111/jftr.70022.