Hilary Surratt, PhD

Dr. Hilary Surratt received her PhD in Psychology in 2005 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Behavioral Science.   Her research focuses on psychosocial and behavioral interventions among populations impacted by substance use disorder, with the central goal of improving health outcomes and optimizing care for underserved people who use drugs in community, treatment and clinical settings. Dr. Surratt’s research to develop and test HIV-related interventions with people who use drugs has contributed to several evidence-based protocols that have been disseminated to scientific and practitioner audiences. She is an NIH-funded principal investigator and an experienced team scientist, contributing expertise in substance use disorder, intervention adaptation, community engagement, qualitative inquiry, and evaluation science to multidisciplinary research teams across the University of Kentucky.  She has collaborated on 22 extramurally funded research grants during her career, including 11 randomized controlled trials, and serving as PI on 6 awards. Most recently, she is PI on a NIH-funded project to develop an integrated Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) HIV care model for people who inject drugs in rural Kentucky, which provides a unique opportunity to mount innovative prevention programs to stem HIV outbreaks in rural areas and contribute to national Ending the HIV Epidemic objectives.   She is collaborating as Community Engagement faculty on the UK HEALing Communities Study that is tackling opioid overdose reduction through community and data driven intervention deployment in 16 Kentucky counties, and as Co-I on two clinical research studies addressing birth outcomes and neonatal abstinence syndrome among pregnant women with opioid use disorder and serious injection-related infections among hospitalized patients with OUD. In addition, Dr. Surratt serves as Director of Evaluation for the Center for Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Kentucky. Her research efforts have resulted in more than 150 peer reviewed publications and book chapters. In the past five years, her published scholarship has been cited in 95 policy documents, including government and think-tank publications and working papers, House Committee documents, and clinical guidelines, which demonstrates impact in the practice and policy arenas. Dr. Surratt engages in service to the field through her ongoing activities as a peer reviewer for NIH Center for Scientific Review as well as several high-impact journals. Additionally, she was recognized with an inaugural Community Engagement Pillar Award from the College of Medicine in 2022. Dr. Surratt is an instructor for MD 811, Introduction to Clinical Medicine, and is active as a mentor for a doctoral candidate in Psychology, a White Coats for Black Lives medical student fellowship recipient, and an early career faculty member of the DREAM Scholars Program.