Jackson Montgomery

Chicago, IL

Patient Health Advocate and Research Coordinator, The University of Chicago Medical Center and The Chicago Center for HIV Elimination

Addressing public health diagnostic disparities on Chicago's South Side by deploying innovative screening tools and establishing replicable citywide frameworks.

Jackson Montgomery is a research coordinator at The Chicago Center for HIV Elimination, where he works to improve access to screening initiatives and improve health outcomes for people living with and at risk for HIV. Operating at the front lines of public health, his model addresses diagnostic disparities on Chicago's South Side by designing discrete, anonymous self-collection screening tools inside emergency departments to bypass clinical stigma and medical distrust. He managed the execution and staff training for this novel program, expanding preventive education and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) access to hard-to-reach individuals that traditional, staff-initiated clinical interventions routinely miss. Through the Scholars program, Jackson plans to work on creating a sustainable, replicable financing and implementation framework to scale his emergency department self-testing model across clinical networks citywide. Jackson plans to leverage the Scholars Program to build interdisciplinary public-private coalitions, transforming a localized clinical protocol into a permanent, standard municipal public health practice.