Kirsten Stoebenau
Dr. Stoebenau is a social and behavioral scientist with expertise in the social determinants of women’s sexual and reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa; and HIV prevention and treatment initiatives. In her work, Dr. Stoebenau draws on social theory and mixed-method approaches to examine how gender inequality and social and economic stratification influence relationships and families, and therefore, carry consequences for HIV risk and prevention, adolescent fertility, and child wellbeing.
Departments/Units
Areas of Interest
Women's Sexual and Reproductive Health; Social Stratification and Social Change; Family Demography; Gender Inequality and Health; Sub-Saharan Africa; HIV risk; HIV prevention; HIV treatment
Dr. Stoebenau has spent over 20 years addressing adolescent girls and young women’s disproportionate risk to HIV. She served as the co-chair of a Working Group on Transactional Sex and HIV under the STRIVE research consortium. This group aimed to better understand and mitigate the role of transactional sex (informal sexual exchange relationships) in adolescent girls and young women’s risk of HIV across sub-Saharan Africa.
She continues work in HIV prevention and treatment through collaborations with the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s Institute of Human Virology. Dr. Stoebenau contributes to intervention development and evaluation of programs that work with community health workers to deliver HIV prevention and treatment services to vulnerable populations in Zambia.
More recently, she has begun to focus on the health impacts of the social stratification of union and family formation processes within the context of rising economic inequality across sub-Saharan Africa. In a project funded by the NICHD, she is using Demographic and Health Survey data to examine trends in the age at first marriage and first childbirth across socio-economic status. In addition, she is working with colleagues across the University on two projects in Nairobi, Kenya, in partnership with the African Population and Health Research Center. These projects aim to improve the measurement of marriage, and assess whether and how the “strength” of a marital relationship and the support of kin impacts women’s and their children’s health and wellbeing in Nairobi, Kenya.
Dr. Stoebenau is also a faculty associate with the Maryland Population Research Center. She comes to the University of Maryland from American University in Washington, D.C., where she was a Research Assistant Professor in the Center on Health, Risk and Society. Before that, she spent five years at the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), an applied research institute addressing gender inequality across the globe.
B.S., Anthropology, 1995
Emory University
Ph.D., Population and Family Health Sciences, 2006
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
HLTH 410 Behavioral and Community Health Honors Seminar
HLTH 302 Methods of Community Health Assessment
HLTH 625 Community Assessment through Qualitative Methods
National Institutes of Mental Health,1R21MH138197-01, Project Title: Scaling Comprehensively Acces to Long-acting for an Effective use of PrEP (SCALE-UP); Role: Co-I, 2024-2026
National Institutes of Mental Health, R21, Project Title: Examining adolescent mothers’ engagement in HIV prevention across high burden HIV countries in Sub Saharan Africa; Role, Co-I, 2024-2026
National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, R01, Project Title: Kinship, Nuptiality, and Child Health Outcomes in Low-Income Urban Area; Role: Senior Co-I, 2020-2025
2024: University of Maryland Provost’s Excellence Award for Professional Track Faculty in Research
2023-24: Leda Amick Wilson Mentoring Award, University of Maryland School of Public Health
2024: Kirsten Stoebenau, Sangeetha Madhavan, Seungwan Kim, and Carol Wainaina. "Measuring union formalization for a new generation of family demography: A case study from urban Kenya." Population and development review 50, no. 1 (2024): 87-116.
2024: Kirsten Stoebenau, Godfrey Muchanga, Sacha St-Onge Ahmad, Chiti Bwalya, Mwangala Mwale, Samara Toussaint, Choolwe Maambo et al. "Barriers and facilitators to uptake and persistence on prep among key populations in Southern Province, Zambia: a thematic analysis." BMC Public Health 24, no. 1: 1617.
2023: Kirsten Stoebenau, Jeffrey Bart Bingenheimer, Nambusi Kyegombe, Reva Datar, and Ismael Ddumba-Nyanzi. "Development of the Gender Roles and Male Provision Expectations Scale." Archives of sexual behavior 52, no. 6: 2403-2419.
2023: Kirsten Stoebenau, Kristin Dunkle, Samantha Willan, Nwabisa Shai, and Andrew Gibbs. "Assessing risk factors and health impacts across different forms of exchange sex among young women in informal settlements in South Africa: A cross-sectional study." Social Science & Medicine 318 (2023): 115637.
2021: Kirsten Stoebenau, Sangeetha Madhavan, Emily Smith‐Greenaway, and Heide Jackson. "Economic inequality and divergence in family formation in sub‐Saharan Africa." Population and development review 47, no. 4 (2021): 887-912.
2019: Kirsten Stoebenau, Nambusi Kyegombe, Jeffrey B. Bingenheimer, Ismael Ddumba-Nyanzi, and Josephine Mulindwa. Developing experimental vignettes to identify gender norms associated with transactional sex for adolescent girls and young women in Central Uganda. Journal of Adolescent Health, 64(4), S60-S66.
2019: Joyce Wamoyi, Meghna Ranganathan, Nambusi Kyegombe and Kirsten Stoebenau. Improving the Measurement of Transactional Sex in sub-Saharan Africa: A Critical Review. JAIDS. 80:4, 367 - 374, 2019.
2018: Kirsten Stoebenau, Joyce Wamoyi, Annie Holmes, Nambusi Kyegombe, Meghna Ranganathan and Lori Heise; with contributions from Holly Prudden and Natalia Bobrova. “Transactional sex and HIV risk: From analysis to action,” STRIVE and UNAIDS Reference Document, Geneva.
2017: Neetu A. John, Kirsten Stoebenau, Samantha Ritter, Jeffrey Edmeades. Gender Socialization during Adolescence in Low and Middle Income Countries: Conceptualization, influences and outcomes. Innocenti Discussion Paper 2017-01, UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti, Florence.
2016: Joyce Wamoyi, Kirsten Stoebenau, Tanya Abramsky, Natalia Bobrova and Charlotte Watts: “Transactional sex and risk for HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” Journal of the International AIDS Society (19) 20992.
2016: Kirsten Stoebenau, Lori Heise, Joyce Wamoyi and Natalia Bobrova: “Revisiting the Understanding of ‘transactional sex’ in sub-Saharan Africa: A review and synthesis of the literature.” Social Science & Medicine (168) 186-197.