Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative

Chase Bryer (Chickasaw Nation) is a current Ph.D. candidate in Behavioral and Social Health Sciences at the Brown University School of Public Health. He joined NAISI in 2022 and has since contributed to programmatic efforts that strengthen the NAISI-affiliated graduate student community at Brown, including dissertation and thesis writing sessions and Lunch & Learns to highlight NAISI-affiliated graduate student research across disciplines. Through his doctoral research, he applies Indigenous research methodologies to deepen understanding of how Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQ+ people living with HIV conceptualize aging. His work seeks to expand the field of gerontology by illuminating aging experiences that are too often invisibilized, while challenging Western "successful aging" narratives that position these communities as outside—or incapable—of aging well using resilience-based approaches. Chase holds an MSW from Washington University in St. Louis and a BA in Human Rights and Media from the University of Oklahoma.