Dr. Rivers is the Director of the Cancer Health Equity Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM). Dr. Rivers is nationally and internationally recognized as a leader in cancer disparities research and former member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Advisory Council on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NACMHD). Dr. Rivers is an active member in the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) community and regularly serves on the faculty for the Scientist to Survivor program.

More recently, Dr. Rivers was elected to serve as Chairperson for the Minorities in Cancer Research Council of the AACR and Conference Co-Chair for the 11th AACR Conference on The Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved. Dr. Rivers is a behavioral scientist with a broad background in implementation science and public health, with specific training and expertise in methodologies commonly used to addressing health disparities, such as the lay health model and the Community-based Participatory Research framework. Dr. Rivers’ specific programs of research are focused on addressing prostate cancer disparities among African Americans and exploring the role of novel communication interventions, such as mobile health technology to advance the recruitment science of medically underserved populations.

Dr. Rivers has worked to identify the sociocultural, behavioral, and environmental determinants of cancer health disparities and translated this information into interventions to improve cancer equity among racially diverse populations and medically underserved groups. Dr. Rivers has developed several psychoeducational interventions for digital platforms such as mobile health applications (apps), to assist with the delivery of salient and tailored cancer research and clnical trials information to high risk groups for prostate cancer, such as African Americans.

Dr. Rivers is a Multiple-Principal Investigator for the NIH National Cancer Institute (NCI) funded PACHE U54 Cancer Research Partnership between MSM, Tuskegee University, and the University of Alabama-Birmingham O’Neil Comprehensive Cancer Center (UAB CCC). Dr. Rivers also serves as the Director of the Integrating Special Populations Core of the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) funded Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance.