What’s it like to age with HIV?

Higinio Fernández-Sánchez, PhD, RN, FAAN, wants to know what life is like for people who have lived for decades, or even their entire lives, with HIV. He will use grant funding from three fellowships to examine the topic.

“We have antiretroviral medications that are very successful at suppressing the HIV virus, and people live long, healthy lives with HIV,” said Fernández-Sánchez, an assistant professor in the Department of Research at Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth Houston. “However, they may not have good quality of life because social stigma remains.”

Through his research study, “Embodied Narratives and Patient-Reported Outcomes in Long-Term and Lifetime HIV Survivors: A Mixed-Methods Body Mapping Study,” he will learn from people who have lived with HIV 10 years or more (long-term survivors) and those who were born with the virus (lifetime survivors). The project will begin with surveys followed by body mapping and one-on-one interviews with a subgroup of participants.

“Body mapping is a creative approach through which participants illustrate outlines of themselves to express their feelings and experiences,” Fernández-Sánchez explained. “They interpret and explain their drawings during the follow up interviews.”

Participants may choose to have their art displayed in a public exhibit at MECA, a community-based organization committed to the health development of underserved families through cultural programming. This community-engaged component will be carried out in partnership with Fundación Latino Americana de Acción Social and its network, along with MECA, which will play a central role in connecting the project to the communities it serves.

Ultimately, Fernández-Sánchez hopes to use quantitative and qualitative data from the study to develop a nurse-led intervention that goes beyond medical treatment to incorporate community-based care. It might include training and education for advocates and even social media influencers.

“There’s a misperception that if you live with HIV, you know about HIV,” he said, noting that information shared through informal channels is sometimes inaccurate and potentially harmful.

Research fellowships from three sources will fund various aspects of the project:

• A Population Health Fellowship from the UTHealth Houston School of Public Health provides $30,000 to support the study component focused on people who have lived with HIV for 10 years or more. This portion centers on understanding the complexities of aging with HIV, including multimorbidity, social isolation, and resilience.
• Fernández-Sánchez is one of 10 nurse scientists nationwide to receive a 2026 Nursing Science Incubator for Social Determinants of Health Solutions (N-SISS) fellowship through the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Solutions. It comes with a $5,000 research grant that he will use to support collecting patient-reported outcomes from long-term survivors and lifetime survivors age 18 and older. This includes the quantitative survey phase and integration with qualitative data, enabling the study to link clinical and psychosocial indicators with embodied and narrative experiences, and strengthening the translation of findings into policy-relevant interventions.
  
  
• His most recent fellowship comes from the Advancing Research Education on the Health of New Americans program at New York University’s Rory Meyers College of Nursing. Fernández-Sánchez is a member of the program’s first cohort. It provides $4,500 in research funding, which will be used to focus on individuals who acquired HIV perinatally and are now navigating adulthood and midlife. Fernández-Sánchez will explore life-course experiences, identity development, stigma, and long-term engagement in care.

The Johns Hopkins and NYU programs are both funded by R25 grants from the National Institute for Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health. They are year-long, intensive programs that pair fellows with mentors and involve in-person and virtual curriculum.