Five blocks south of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in a sea of abandoned rowhomes, there stands a relatively new four-story brick building. In the world of AIDS research, it’s well known as the home of ALIVE, the longest running study of HIV and injection drug use.

But to one woman who works there, the 25-year-old project means so much more. She might even say, redemption.

“I just saw myself as people called me – as a junkie,” Bert Queen told independent radio producer Scott Goldberg. “They saw that I was a sick person that was trying to get better.”

Goldberg recently scoured the streets of Baltimore with Queen, a former heroin user who is now a “tracker” for the community-based ALIVE study.

ALIVE, which stands for AIDS Linked to the Intravenous Experience, is run by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health with funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

One reason for ALIVE’s longevity and success? The short, streetwise, 59-year-old dreadlocked dynamo named Bertha Queen, known to pretty much everyone as “Bert.”

Reporting for The Brew, Scott Goldberg has THIS profile.
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NOTE: This story was reported and recorded by Scott Goldberg, a Baltimore-based independent public radio producer whose work has focused on urban issues and science, health and medicine. Next month, he’s off to Chicago to begin physician training at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.

The photos of Bert Queen were shot by Hanna Jamal, a Baltimore-based aid worker, educator and photographer. Here are some more of them: