Overview Abstract/Summary The overarching theme of the Penn Mental Health AIDS Research Center (PMHARC) at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and Wistar Institute (Wistar) is to transform how individuals with comorbid mental illness/AIDS are treated and managed by developing innovative, interdisciplinary, and integrative approaches to optimize psychiatric, behavioral, and medical outcomes and achieving a better understanding of the biological, psychological, and behavioral mechanisms underlying these combined illnesses and treatments. No other center in the U.S. is currently pursuing this explicit focus, making PMHARC unique in the NIMH ARC portfolio. A substantial body of work links psychiatric disorders to acquisition of HIV infection, accelerated immune dysfunction, poor access to HIV care, and poor adherence to antiretroviral treatment once in care. Yet, there remains a relative paucity of evidence-based interventions focused on the combined treatment of mental illness/HIV and related medical co-morbidities, and relatively little work in determining the relationships between mental health treatment and HIV disease and understanding the underlying biology. PMHARC will continue to stimulate novel approaches and strategies to address these problems by providing mentoring and resource support for both new and established investigators choosing to study comorbid mental illness/HIV, in part through innovative pilot studies. PMHARC's leadership has extensive expertise in contemporary pharmacotherapy of mental illness and HIV, cognitive behavioral treatments, and theory-based behavioral interventions. PMHARC will extend well-established collaborations at Penn, CHOP, and Wistar including those in the Department of Psychiatry and the CFAR, as well as with the CTSA/CTRC, the Delaney Collaboratory, and community partners in Philadelphia. A unique feature of PMHARC is the collaboration of well established mental health/HIV researchers, well-established mental health researchers who have not previously studied HIV, well-established substance use/HIV researchers who have not previously studied mental health, and HIV researchers not previously focused on mental health. PMHARC has an Administrative and Developmental Core, and four Shared Resource Cores.

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