Dr. Stark's research focuses on the development and testing of behavioral interventions to reduce drug use and improve sexual health outcomes among populations at high risk for HIV infection.
See Contact DetailsDr. Starks earned his undergraduate degree from the University of South Dakota (2003) and his doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2009. He is a licensed psychologist in New York State and a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers. He has taught undergraduate courses in Human Sexuality and Statistics as well as MA-level courses in Research Methods and Statistics at Hunter.
My research focuses on substance use and sexual health in sexual minority populations, with a particular emphasis on relationship factors associated with sexual health in gay and bisexual men. After more than a decade, my team and I are responsible for the production of more than 50 publications on this topic. Noteworthy papers in this area include one of the most comprehensive assessments of whether associations between drug use and sexual behavior generalize from single to partnered sexual minority men (involving a sample of 65,000); the first paper testing indirect effects in the context of an Actor Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) with exchangeable dyads; and the first paper testing a 3-level APIM predicting day-level associations among partners' sexual behavior and drug use. Most recently, I introduced procedures for covariate hurdle modeling - an innovation that permits the incorporation of relationship covariates into analyses that pool single and partnered people - in a paper published by the Journal of Sex Research.
