Peter Thibodeaux is a fun-loving and energetic person who has been involved in community advocacy work since 2010. One of Peter’s passions is community service. As an ACTG community advocate with the Grady Ponce de Leon Center and other local community-based organizations, he works to promote better health and well-being for those in need, including low-income housing opportunities for individuals impacted by HIV.
Peter has been the ACTG GCAB Representative for Emory-CDC PONCE CRS, in Atlanta, Georgia since 2018. He is currently serving on the GCAB HIV Aging Working Group and has also served in many leadership roles as a CAB member at the local site since 2012. He is also working on the Protocol/Consent Review Sub-Committee at the local CAB to ensure that ethical research practices and procedures are followed.
Peter works alongside the local Recruitment and Retention Team to integrate community involvement. He often speaks with potential research participants at the site’s Community Health Night on the second Tuesday of each month. This event encourages the community to come out and engage with the research team and to receive health screenings, and free HIV and STI testing. This is a great opportunity for Peter to interact with the community and his peers, which he feels is important, as it has been proven that peer-to-peer interactions are a helpful resource for the site, and encourage study enrollment and retention. Peter is also a strong advocate for ensuring that potential participants receive relevant and easy-to-understand research information.
Peter feels that serving as the GCAB and local CAB member, has given him a great opportunity to work with the site’s Principal Investigators Jeffrey Lennox, M.D. and Carlos del Rio, M.D., and other site leaders to highlight the importance of the community voice and to ensure that research-related information is in laymen’s terms for the community.
For many years Peter has volunteered his services, setting up and participating in the AIDS Walk & 5K Run in Atlanta. In mid-December, you’ll find Peter volunteering his time at the For the Kid in All of Us Annual Toy Party as a greeter and host. On any given day, you may see him giving out snack packs and/or personal hygiene kits to the homeless in different parks downtown.
He is a self-described “foodie” and loves trying out new places to eat. While he enjoys a variety of foods, he admits that pasta and sherbet are some of his favorites.