2026 RIAA Honoree Dr. LaRon Nelson
Dr. Nelson is the Independence Foundation Professor of Nursing at Yale University and Director of the Community Capacity, and Economics Core in the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA) at the Yale School of Public Health. He specializes in human-centered implementation science—a field he advances by building synergistic bridges between scientific inventions, healthcare systems, business model innovation, and sustainable community development.
His research focuses on designing and testing business models and operational strategies to scale the implementation of evidence-based practices, particularly for HIV and posttraumatic stress. He is the founder of HIV Implementation Science to Optimize Research Impact (HISTORI), a US-based network of community, clinical, business, and academic stakeholders working to translate biomedical discoveries into economically sustainable clinical and community impacts. He also founded the Kumasi & Accra Project to Prevent AIDS (KAPPA), an implementation science alliance focusing on sustainable, community-led HIV prevention and treatment solutions in Ghana. He is an elected Fellow in the New York Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Nursing.
