Matthew Town is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work, and the school's Researcher of the Year.
Dr. Town is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, a Two-Spirit scholar, a behavioral scientist, and an advocate for social justice in health. He earned his PhD in the Department of Sociology at Portland State University in 2014. He has taught as an Adjunct Professor for the Department of Sociology at PSU and the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. Before joining the School of Social Work at PSU, Dr. Town was an Assistant Professor at Pacific University, a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona, and briefly held a post-doc position at the University of California, San Diego.
As an Indigenous/multiracial scholar, Dr. Town's scholarship is committed to interrupting legacies of trauma that affect marginalized communities. He does this work by centering culture and diversity science to the health and well-being of people. Dr. Town's ongoing scholarly interests include stress coping processes, resilience, prevention research, Indigenous health, HIV/STIs, health care services research, and substance use. His research focuses is largely community based working with American Indian and Alaska Native communities, queer and trans communities, and other underserved populations.
Dr. Town is currently the Principal Investigator on three projects: The Native Access project is a NIH-funded research project exploring the experience of initiation and sustained use of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV among American Indian and Alaska Native sexual and gender diverse men; the LGBTQIA+ Community Resilience project, also NIH-funded, which explores the idea of community resilience among queer and trans folx in Oregon; and The local chapter of the National HIV Behavioral Surveillance (NHBS), also known as Chime In.
He has experience working with Tribal communities, Tribal Epidemiology Centers, and the Indian Health Services. Dr. Town also worked in public health practice in multiple Tribal Epidemiology Centers, several county health departments in Oregon, and completed several contracts with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.