Welcome to ISGH Research Director Steven John, PhD, MPH

Steven A. John, PhD, MPH (he/him/they), is the director of research at the Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health (ISGH) and an associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. His NIH-funded research focuses on developing behavioral interventions and implementation strategies to improve biomedical care engagement, particularly in the areas of HIV and STI treatment and prevention. Dr. John joined the department in early February 2025.

Can you please share your career progression and how you ended up in your field?

As an undergraduate at University of Wisconsin-Madison, I was a pre-med student and was very interested in a career as a family medicine physician.

And as part of preparing for medical school, I spent some time shadowing and volunteering. It was over the course of those activities that I saw some of the challenges and lack of accuracy in sexual health care in some primary care settings, and it led me to have an interest in the career I have today.

I decided to pursue public health as the Affordable Care Act was also energizing the field of public health at that time, coming out of my undergrad. I planned to pursue an MPH, seeing if I wanted to continue in research or still consider a progression into medical school.

During that time, I took a year after my undergrad before graduate school and worked in the pharmaceutical industry as a bench scientist, and that has had an impact on my interest in biomedical treatment and prevention, which has been a lot of my work throughout my career.

I found public health as my home and, during my PhD in public health program, I expanded my focus to STI prevention, which ultimately led to a focus on HIV prevention and LGBTQ health research during my postdoc in New York City.

Several big things happened while I was in graduate school related to HIV prevention in particular, which energized my focus within the biomedical prevention space. Seminar papers confirmed findings for things that we now refer to as “treatment as prevention.” This research found that engaging individuals living with HIV in care not only helped support their health and wellbeing, but also helped prevent onward transmission of HIV to sexual partners. In addition, the new, once-daily pill called “PrEP” (HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis) also came around that same time, receiving FDA approval in 2012. In addition to these biomedical tools of HIV treatment and prevention, we also had the FDA approval of an over-the-counter HIV self-test, where individuals were no longer required to go to a clinic to receive HIV testing. All of these exciting scientific advancements fueled my desire to help get these to people in need.

Fast forward a decade, and a lot of the challenges that we had engaging individuals in treatment and prevention a decade previous were still occurring, and there was a big push in our field to focus more on implementation science. That led to my objectives now, which are to help bring new clinical innovations and evidence-based practice to clinical care settings, ultimately to improve public health. A lot of my research focus has been on that, leveraging what we already know based on many decades of research, and brainstorming innovative ways to speed up the translation of those findings to patient impact.

Why are you passionate about your research focus areas?

The most important thing for me is being reflexive in the many privileges that I have. I find it wrong that we have so many health disparities and inequities in health. I feel that health is a human right, and that has provided direction and served as a steering wheel for my career in trying to help improve health outcomes among the populations that we work with.

What do you look forward to in your new role as ISGH research director, and where do you hope to take its research under your leadership?

I look forward to furthering the growth in externally funded research at ISGH, as well as helping mentor ISGH’s early career researchers and trainees, in my role as research director. I think the impact I can have in those two areas in particular were my main impetus for coming here to the University of Minnesota.

I hope to not only help boost the amount of funding that we have, but also the impact of the research that is occurring here at ISGH. The institute has decades of experience establishing new innovations and evidence-based care in sexual and gender health, and I hope that my expertise in implementation science can help expand the reach of that work.

My hope is to also expand the research breadth as well as the impact of the institute's efforts. Given a lot of the recent challenges and opposition to our work, I think it's more important than ever that we exist and that we continue our efforts.

What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

I enjoy doing a lot of outdoor activities. I'm a big cyclist, and I definitely enjoy riding my bike. I put thousands of miles on my bikes each year, and I have several different bikes for all the different seasons and types of events.

I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old, and my spouse and I enjoy doing fun things on our bikes as a family–we look forward to biking to the Minnesota Zoo frequently this summer. When we can, we also like to play pickleball. My spouse and I can be fiercely competitive, which is quite fun on the courts with folks from different generations.

Mostly, I just like to do a lot of outdoor activities including things like camping and skiing and hiking. That has also led to where we decided to live here in the Twin Cities, specifically Eagan, where we're close to some of the Lebanon Hills’ trailheads, which is really nice.

What are your hopes for the future of sexual and gender health in terms of research or patient care?

I am most hopeful that sexual and gender health care can become apolitical and we can, as a society, realize it's important for all—regardless of political affiliation. The divisiveness of health in politics has had a major impact on folks that we work with, and that does a disservice to us all.

Learn more about sexual and gender health research on the Eli Coleman Institute of Sexual and Gender Health website.