Dr. Schnarrs is accepting PhD students for Fall 2025.
Phillip W. Schnarrs is an LGBTQ+ health scholar with an emphasis in HIV prevention, behavioral and mental health, and the role of early life adversity and stress in shaping these experiences. His work spans population health studies, intervention trials, and community engaged research. His research is focused on understanding the role of early life adversity on health, wellbeing, and functioning in adulthood. In addition, his work considers how early life experiences shape our social contexts, including social and economic determinants of health and perceptions of social safety in adulthood, and what this means for health, wellbeing and functioning over the life course. His paper, Differences in adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and quality of physical and mental health between transgender and cisgender sexual minorities, was the first to document disparities in ACEs exposure among transgender individuals. His work in this area has also focused on examining the relationship between early life adversity and substance misuse and addiction, suicidality, and mental health outcomes in adulthood like depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
More specifically, his work is concerned with understanding the nature, prevalence, and impact of identity-based early life adversity in SGM populations. As part of his Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Fellowship with The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation he developed and tested the Sexual and Gender Minority Adverse Childhood Experiences (SGM-ACEs) Scale. SGM-ACEs are exposures to discrimination, mistreatment, and violence experience by SGM young people at the interpersonal (e.g, family dynamics), organizational (e.g., religious trauma), community (e.g., vicarious trauma), and policy levels (e.g., discriminatory legislation) levels. He is currently funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health to further develop and test the SGM-ACEs Scale and examine the role of SGM-ACEs exposure on inflammatory blood-based biomarkers in adulthood - building evidence for how social exposures “get under our skin.”
Prior to his research on early life adversity, Schnarrs was an established HIV prevention researcher, focused on biomedical HIV prevention methods, and his work continues in this area. He has had extensive funding to better understand preferences for and barriers to accessing longer-acting pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV prevention in transgender and gender expansive individuals, and sexual minority men. This line of research has also sought to understand how early life experiences shape HIV prevention and testing methods. Most recently his work in this area has focused on the effect of early live adversity on HIV-related outcomes like viral load suppression and quality of life in older adults with HIV, and the role of mediating factors like psychological distress and social stressors like stigma and discrimination.
His research is also centered on developing and testing interventions to address mental health and substance misuse in SGM people. He is currently funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to understand better what interventions work best to prevent suicide of SGM young adults in primary care settings. Moreover, this area of inquire is focused on developing community-centered harm reduction interventions to support and care for sexual minority men who engage in chemsex.
Schnarrs has extensive training in community engaged research, specifically community-based participatory research. He most recently was director of the Texas People-centered Research, Intervention Design and Evaluation (PRIDE) in Health Collaborative, a PCORI-funded engagement project meant to drive collaboration between SGM Texas and researchers. He is also interested in improving measurement and theory related to the science of research engagement and is the Co-PI on a PCORI-funded study to develop and test a measure of organizational trustworthiness in community-academic research partnerships, in collaboration with the Hastings Center for Bioethics – the premier bioethics institute in the United States.
Schnarrs is a Pittsburgh native growing up in the South Hills. He is also a longtime advocate for queer and trans communities having served on the boards of Texas Pride Impact Funds, Out Youth, and Austin Roundup - a non-profit organization focused on supporting the LGBTQ+ recovery community in Central Texas. In his free time, he enjoys engaging in physical activity, being in nature, and spending time with his chosen family, including his boxer Lily.
