Martinique Free

Martinique Free began community engagement work in her early years and her passion grew from those experiences into community based participatory research while working with the HIV community in Pittsburgh, PA. In addition to the Humanities Truck project centered on Black Women’s health, her recent work involves the development of community-based interventions to decrease HIV perinatal transmission and empowering communities using a “bottom-up” stabilization strategy to alleviate poverty in the Manafwa District of Uganda. Dr. Free’s other areas of interest include health disparities, reproductive justice and women’s health in minority populations, health equity, and understanding cultural relevance as it relates to health promotion and disease prevention. An important component of her teaching responsibilities at American University involves developing courses or incorporating a component centered around community-based learning and in some cases, community engaged research for the Department of Health Studies