Built by researchers who have spent decades in this field.

My work has always started with the same question: why do evidence-based programs so rarely reach the people they were designed for? I have asked it as a health educator in Philadelphia public schools, as a harm reduction specialist in rural Montana, and for the past several years as a federal grant PI leading research on sexual health education technology at dfusion. The answer is almost never about the science. It is almost always about infrastructure, access, and the gap between what a program requires of the people delivering it and what those people have actually been prepared to do.

That question is what led to MPC: VISTA.

As Principal Investigator, I lead the team, the partnerships, and the scientific direction of the project. That means working closely with co-PI and dfusion CEO Tamara Kuhn on the technology architecture, with Senior Project Director B.A. Laris on study rigor and evaluation design, with MPC co-developer Dr. Loretta Sweet Jemmott and our full advisory panel on training content and authenticity, and with the educators across the country whose early feedback shaped every aspect of how MPC: VISTA works. Bringing those perspectives together, and making sure the resulting product is both scientifically sound and something a real educator in a real classroom can actually use, is the work I find most meaningful.

I have been writing and managing federal grants for sexual health education research for more than a decade, including awards from the NIH, CDC, and Department of Education. Before leading MPC: VISTA, I spent years at ETR and dfusion coordinating large-scale randomized trials of evidence-based sexual health curricula in schools across the country. I also designed and self-published Pregnancy: It’s a Roll of the Dice, a game-based activity on contraceptive effectiveness used in school districts nationally.

Tamara Kuhn has spent more than 25 years at the frontier of technology-delivered health education and behavioral science. As CEO of dfusion, she leads the design and engineering of the interactive simulation platforms that make MPC: VISTA possible.

She has served as Principal Investigator on more than 25 NIH, NSF, and CDC-funded projects, developing computer- and mobile-based interventions for HIV prevention, sexual health, and health literacy across diverse populations, including Black women, transgender women, Black men who have sex with men, Latinas, and older adults. Her intervention programs have been licensed by the National Library of Medicine.

Her approach to health technology combines rigorous social science, user-centered design (she is trained at Stanford’s d.school and IDEO U), and deep programming expertise in web, mobile, and simulation environments. She holds a patent for a system for personalized rendering of digitized teaching microskill modeling, the technology infrastructure that underlies MPC: VISTA’s simulations.

Tamara also serves as a grant reviewer for the NIH and a peer reviewer for the Journal of Medical Internet Research, JMIR mHealth and uHealth, Health Promotion Practice, and Youth and Society.

B.A. Laris brings more than 30 years of experience in sexual and reproductive health research, digital media content development, and school-based program evaluation to MPC: VISTA. As Senior Project Director and Evaluation Lead, she oversees the operational rigor that makes the NIH-funded study work, from data collection protocols to implementation fidelity.

She has led or co-led more than 15 school-based randomized controlled trials in K-12 schools across the United States. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Adolescent Health, Health Promotion Practice, Sex Education, and Preventive Medicine.

Her career has always been shaped by the belief that the most important question in public health is not whether a program works in a research setting, but whether it works in the real world, with real teachers, in real schools.

Parie Bhandari brings more than five years of experience in public health research, community engagement, and HIV prevention to the MPC: VISTA study. As Research Coordinator, she manages the day-to-day operations of the NIH-funded trial, including participant recruitment and enrollment, data collection logistics, protocol adherence, and study tracking across all three arms.

Before joining dfusion, Parie served as Senior Manager of HIV and Health Equity at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, where she coordinated a national HIV self-testing initiative across the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Prior to that, she was Community Engagement Coordinator at SisterLove, Inc., where she managed the community liaison portfolio for ERASE HIV, a national NIH-funded HIV cure research study, and led a community advisory board focused on building HIV cure literacy in affected communities.

Her research has been published in Contraception: X and BMJ Open. She speaks Spanish.