At the start of the year, prestigious journal Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) welcomed PhD student Mr Rayner Tan on its editorial board, as part of the editorial team of its new series — Perspectives.
The second issue was published on 17 April 2020, with Rayner as one of the co-authors. Today we have the pleasure to speak with him about his research and the difference he hopes to make in public health.
Perspectives is targeted at clinicians and translational researchers. Each issue identifies interesting articles and proposes the implications of each article for current or near-future clinical practice. The series is free for public access; the first two issues are available here and here.
How do you feel being a part of STI’s Perspectives Editorial Board? Tell us more about how this came about.
I feel very lucky and privileged to be a part of it. Many of the researchers whom I look up to, and whose research I follow, make up the editorial board of the journal. I am excited to be taking the opportunity to learn from them and network with some of the best academics researching sexually transmitted infections.
The journal made a call for additional members of their editorial board sometime in October last year, and I decided to take a leap of faith and apply for it. I am very grateful to the editor-in-chief, Professor Anna Maria Geretti for taking a chance on an early-career academic like myself.
Tell us a bit more about your PhD research work.
With my background in the social sciences and sociology, I have always been interested in how people and communities participate, organise themselves, and interact at the individual, community and institutional levels. I saw this as an approach that has been applied less in public health research in Singapore, and thought this was a great opportunity to contribute to this emerging field.
My thesis explores the associations between stigma and health-seeking behaviours. Specifically, I am looking into the stigma around men who have sex with men (MSM) and their access to testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections in Singapore.
Now that I am more or less done with my thesis, I am also expanding my research into other areas of inquiry, including work on HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, running Singapore’s first cohort study on sexual and mental health among young MSM, as well as a book project on trauma, sexualised substance use and incarceration among substance-using MSM in Singapore.
I am also working on collaborations to start work on sexual health and substance use among Singaporean youth.
What kind of difference would you like to make in public health?
At a personal level, I hope to bridge gaps between the needs of communities, especially ones that are underserved and the health systems that serve them.
As a researcher, I cannot profess to represent the needs of the communities that I work with, but what I can do is acknowledge my privileged position as a researcher who can offer a voice to participants through my work, or even point out the lack of community participation at all levels of decision-making.
Academically, I would also like to serve as a bridge — specifically as a bridge between the social sciences and public health to grow socio-behavioural research and social epidemiology as sub-disciplines. For example, while HIV and substance use are often viewed in general as pathological aspects of society (and oftentimes pathologies of individual morality), especially when using a traditional biomedical lens, I have been trained to view them without prejudice as the logical outcome of multiple moving parts that interact with one another. In other words, as an academic, what we normally label as ‘poor’ health outcomes to be ‘treated’ in fact offer an entry point into very rich and complex issues of community-based health participation, as well as the role of culture, politics and society in reproducing, facilitating or restricting health-related behaviours at the individual level. The dynamism inherent in this social scientific approach to individual and population health means that there are endless possibilities to what we may know about a given subject!
Tell us something surprising about you that people may not know.
I used to be a chef, and used to co-own a café with my family called De La Crème at Siglap Drive back in 2011 to 2012. I had completed my basic certificate in Pastry at Le Cordon Bleu Paris prior to my bachelors in Business Management at the Singapore Management University (SMU). Subsequently, I withdrew from the course for about two years to deal with some personal issues and the closure of the family business.
When I was readmitted to SMU, I switched courses to a social science degree (specifically, in Sociology), and that’s where my love for research and community-based health participation grew.
I have been a shareholder of Patisserie G since 2015, which is owned by a really good friend Gwen whom I met in culinary school back in 2009. One might not associate the food and beverage industry with academia, but I must say that the skills associated with entrepreneurship, such as human resource management, business development, operations management and customer service have been extremely useful for my work in academia!
