Assistant Professor · Brown School at WashU · he/him
Joshua A. Rusow, PhD, MSW
I study how LGBTQ+ young people navigate relationships, stress, and safety — and I build technology that helps them thrive.
Social work researcher working at the intersection of adolescent health, violence prevention, and artificial intelligence.
> NOW: SQuARE cohort analysis underway · R01s under review at NIMHD · teaching Human Behavior in the Social Environment
Stats via Google Scholar & CV, June 2026.
Select a quest line
Four threads, one mission: helping queer kids grow up healthy
Full research map →LGBTQ+ Youth Mental Health
Minority stress, suicide prevention, crisis services, and school-based programs like Proud & Empowered — understanding what hurts and testing what helps.
▸ EnterRelationships & Violence Prevention
How queer teens learn what healthy love looks like — and what happens when dating violence, monitoring, or digital abuse enters the picture.
▸ EnterDigital Health + AI
From one of the first sexual-health chatbots (2017) to LLM-powered affirming support: building and trialing tools that reach youth where they are.
▸ EnterSexual Health & HIV Prevention
PrEP access, STI testing, and technology-based prevention with trans and gender-expansive youth — including the TechStep and TRUTH studies.
▸ EnterNow playing
Active projects
All projects →SQuARE — Study of Queer Adolescent Relationship Experiences
A national study of how LGBTQ+ teens develop ideas about romantic relationships, who their role models are, and how violence shapes health. Data collection complete; eight first-authored papers in the pipeline.
Conversational AI for social connection
A proposed randomized trial of an affirming, safety-engineered AI chatbot to increase social connectedness and reduce depression and anxiety among sexual minority youth ages 13–25 (NIMHD).
Trajectories of intimate partner violence
Federally funded longitudinal research mapping how IPV unfolds over time for sexual minority youth (NIMHD R01, PI: Rhoades), plus a multi-level school intervention trial for LGBTQ+ students.
High scores
Recent & representative work
All 26+ publications →-
Rusow, J. A., Srivastava, A., Bray, B. C., Goldbach, J. T., & Kipke, M. D. (2024). Intimate partner violence types are differentially associated with substance use among young, urban, sexual minority men of color. PLoS ONE, 19(9), e0309958.
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Reback, C. J., Cain, D., Rusow, J. A., et al. (2024). Technology-based interventions, with a stepped care approach, for reducing sexual risk behaviors and increasing PrEP initiation among transgender and gender expansive youth and young adults. AIDS & Behavior.
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Srivastava, A., Rusow, J. A., Schrager, S. M., Stephenson, R., & Goldbach, J. T. (2023). Digital sexual violence and suicide risk in a national sample of sexual minority adolescents. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 38(3–4), 4443–4458.
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Rusow, J. A., Hidalgo, M. A., Calvetti, S., Quint, M., Wu, S., Bray, B. C., & Kipke, M. (2022). Health and service utilization among a sample of gender-diverse youth of color: The TRUTH Study. BMC Public Health, 22, 2312.
Research, minus the jargon
Study guides for humans
Open the library →Journal articles are written for other researchers. These short guides are for everyone else — students, parents, practitioners, journalists, and the young people this work is actually about. Each one covers what we did, what we found, and why it matters, in plain English.
When violence and substance use collide
Different types of partner violence travel with different substances — and "checking your phone" abuse is its own beast.
The threat is worse than the post
For queer teens, being threatened with image leaks predicts suicide risk even more strongly than actual leaks.
What trans youth of color actually need
The TRUTH Study: when 61% of your sample faces food insecurity, "health behavior" isn't the whole story.