About the Owner

Ken Vail, MPH, MA, has worked in the areas of disease prevention, care, treatment, and health promotion with people most impacted by drug use since 1989. Over the past 20 years, he has helped design, implement, and evaluate health interventions on a national and international level. Ken has worked at agencies throughout the United States to develop and direct population-specific harm reduction strategies aimed at improving individual and community health. He has also conducted domestic consulting work with the University of Tennessee School of Social Work, PreventionWorks!, Washington DC, and Cambridge Cares About AIDS. In 1997, Ken was part of a team of public health professionals, including internationally known drug use researcher Jean-Paul Grund, PhD, representatives from UNAIDS, the Open Society Institute, and local drug user advocates, who were invited to Kazakhstan, located in Central Asia, to provide technical advise and assistance in the development of a culturally specific program for substance users. This was the first rapid assessment of injection drug user needs in Kazakhstan. As part of this international team effort, drug user activists were inspired to launch the first harm reduction program in Temirtau, Kazakhstan, a city where approximately 80% of new cases of HIV were directly associated with drug use. Today, there are more than 170 harm reduction programs country-wide. His areas of interest include HIV/AIDS, opioid overdose education, prevention, and reversal, viral hepatitis, health advocacy, harm reduction program start-up, and program/systems integration. Ken recently completed a year-long harm reduction systems integration project for Harlem United Community AIDS Center, one of the largest AIDS Service Organizations in New York City. Ken continues to work on his memoirs as part of a larger harm reduction project with Getty Images photojournalist David Holloway. In Fall 2010, he opened Healthy Rhythm Consulting & Community Art Gallery on Courthouse Square in Fairfield, Texas, to further expand his harm reduction and art, coffee bar/lounge, and performance venue endeavors.

Ken has carried out innovative action oriented research on state, federal and local levels with diverse populations in California, Massachusetts and Ohio. In 1999, Ken was awarded the first State of Ohio Department of Public Health Advocacy Award for his groundbreaking work with injection drug users and needle exchange programs. He received his B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California Santa Cruz, his M.P.H. in Social and Behavioral Sciences from Boston University School of Public Health, and his M.A. in Medical Anthropology from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Ken focused his graduate studies on systematic approaches for creating culturally appropriate and population-specific health education programs for individuals at greatest risk for HIV and HCV infection.

Ken is affiliated with the following local, national, and international boards, working groups and committees: National Harm Reduction Working Group, Cleveland North Coast HIV/AIDS Coalition, International Harm Reduction Association, Ohio AIDS Coalition, AIDS Action Council, California HIV/AIDS Advocacy Coalition, Santa Clara County HIV Community Prevention Planning Group, United States Conference on AIDS Host Committee, Santa Clara County Hepatitis C Planning Group, Santa Clara County Hepatitis C Steering Committee, Santa Clara County Health Services Institutional Review Board, 14th International Conference on Drug-Related Harm Advisory Panel, TRANS Project Community Advisory Panel, and the San Francisco Department of Public Health HIV Prevention Planning Council and Prevention for Positives Committee.