Pieter Remes

Pieter studied African History & Linguistics at Ghent University, Belgium, and graduated in 1989. After several visits to East Africa and a year of fieldwork in Mwanza, Tanzania, which focused on urban youth culture and popular language, he obtained a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology (Northwestern University, USA) in 1998. Before completing his Ph.D., Pieter joined Médecins Sans Frontières (Belgium) and worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1995-1997, where he coordinated research on sexual health behavior of young people and developed an HIV/AIDS-awareness brochure for secondary school students. In 1999, he conducted ethnographic research with sex workers in Chicago, USA. From 1999-2003, he worked with the HIV/STI Research and Intervention Unit of the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM, Belgium) on sexual behavior of young people and clients of sex workers in 4 African cities. He also taught the module of Qualitative Research Methods in Public Health at ITM. In 2003-2004, he was an NIMH-Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Children's Mental Health and AIDS Prevention at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He returned to Tanzania in 2005 and was a consultant for Harvard University on a research intervention of early adolescence and parenting in Moshi. Pieter joined MRC in 2006 and is based in Mwanza, where he is involved in the development of a community-based sexual health intervention, part of the Research Consortium Programme on HIV and sexual health in developing countries. His research interests are youth cultures, education-entertainment, community-based interventions, HIV/AIDS, and developing social science research capacity in Africa.