The proposed study aims to develop and pilot a brief, firefighter-specific, peer-led psychoeducation program to address hazardous drinking within the context of occupational stress and trauma exposure. The program consists of a single, in-person, group-based session that provides practical, evidence-informed education on the relationships among trauma, stress, alcohol use, resilience, and behavioral health resources. The psychoeducation program will be developed iteratively with firefighters, delivered by trained firefighter peer leaders, and evaluated in a pilot study to assess its feasibility and acceptability. The long-term goal is to create a culturely aligned and scalable resource that fire departments can use to strengthen behavioral health support and resilience among their members.
Patient Population: Adults
Firefighter Intervention for Recovery and Engagement using Personalized Feedback (FIRE-PF) Study
The proposed study seeks to develop and pilot the first trauma-informed, firefighter-specific personalized feedback intervention (PFI) to reduce hazardous drinking by integrating qualitative methods, user-centered design, and implementation science. The intervention will be developed iteratively with firefighters and evaluated using a pilot randomized controlled trial. This work will establish the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of a scalable, culturally tailored intervention designed to address hazardous drinking within the unique context of the fire service. Findings from this project will lay the foundation for a future efficacy and implementation trial and support the development of sustainable, evidence-based alcohol interventions for firefighters.
Improving fathers’ mental health, parenting, and familial engagement through an mHealth intervention in Kenya
One in ten fathers experience severe mental health challenges due to the stressors of parenting. Fathers’ mental health plays a pivotal role in early child social-emotional development with impact throughout a child’s lifespan. Parenting interventions that support effective parenting knowledge, skills, and behaviors improve parent-child mental health outcomes, including in low- and middle-income settings. Yet in-person mental health services for men are scarce and are stigmatizing and logistically challenging for fathers to attend. We propose to develop and pilot test a novel mHealth parenting intervention specifically designed for Kenyan fathers through a user-centered co-design approach.
Global Health Experiential Fellowship
The Global Health Experiential Fellowship (GHEF) is a Global South–North simultaneous training program that prepares students and early-career professionals to become global health researchers. Based in rural Uganda, the fellowship offers immersive, mentored experience in study design, data collection, implementation science, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Fellows contribute to ongoing community-based research alongside local partners, gaining practical skills in ethical engagement, cross-cultural research, and field-based methods. GHEF provides a distinctive opportunity to build research capacity, strengthen career development, and contribute to locally led global health initiatives through Empower Through Health.
Empower Through Health
Empower Through Health (ETH) is a healthcare, research, and education 501c3 organization operating in rural eastern Uganda. ETH runs a health center that provides general medical care for surrounding communities and delivers psychiatric and neurological services across Buyende District (population >400,000). ETH’s research focuses on reducing demand-side barriers to care and partnering with existing community structures to improve mental health outcomes and support recovery after mental health crises. ETH hosts the Global Health Experiential Fellowship (GHEF), a hands-on training program that pairs Ugandan and U.S. trainees on community-engaged research. ETH is also expanding its education mission by launching a primary school to strengthen long-term community wellbeing.
Developing a Therapeutic Community in Washington State
We are exploring the feasibility of establishing a long-term, residential Therapeutic Community in Washington State for adults living with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, biplolar disorder and other serious mental illnesses. Such a facility would fill a critical gap in our current system, providing a complete spectrum of care for those in our community with chronic mental health conditions. Beyond offering patients and families a safe and therapeutic way to continue their recovery, we would hope to develop this program as a site of research and innovation and a site where we can teach and inspire the next generation of mental health care professionals for our state. Ultimately, we would like to help other communities build programs of their own.
A scalable psychoeducational intervention to improve sexual quality of life in women by addressing reproductive anxiety
This project aims to understand how concerns about pregnancy, whether planning for a child or trying to avoid an unintended one, affect women’s sexual well-being. Despite public health goals to reduce unintended pregnancies and STDs (Higgins et al., 2009), and the importance of sexual health to overall quality of life (Flynn et al., 2016), little research has explored the specific impact of pregnancy-related worries on sexual satisfaction and experience in women who are not currently pregnant (Bond et al., 2023a; Higgins et al., 2009). We know that sexual function issues are prevalent even among women planning pregnancy. We propose to explore pregnancy concerns and sexual quality of life among women (Bond et al., 2023b). We will then provide targeted education (depending on the responses in the survey and can differ for each individual) addressing their specific concerns and measure their sexual quality of life again to see if this information helps improve their sexual experience. The findings will highlight the sexual health needs related to pregnancy concerns and inform future educational programs.
Developing person-specific signatures of momentary risk for alcohol use
Alcohol use disorder remains a major public health concern, with persistent disparities in treatment outcomes. Traditional interventions often fail to account for the heterogeneity of drinking triggers, limiting their effectiveness. This study aims to develop and evaluate an idiographic, mobile-based clinical tool to identify personalized triggers for alcohol use. Idiographic methods allow for individualized assessments of momentary risk factors, providing tailored insights into when a person is most vulnerable to drinking.
The study will allow for customization of a given participant’s data collection process, such that individuals can track what is clinically meaningful to them (e.g. one individual may track feelings of loneliness following divorce, while another may track experiences of racial microaggressions) through diverse data collection techniques including ecological momentary assessment (EMA), audio diaries, and GPS. We will evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of this approach by pilot testing the data collection process, analyzing each participant’s data, and providing personalized feedback on the momentary conditions that influence one’s drinking.
This approach leverages current advances in mobile monitoring and precision idiographic machine learning analysis to pilot a novel clinical tool. If successful, this tool could enhance treatment equity and effectiveness by empowering individuals to recognize their unique drinking triggers.
How fentanyl changes the brain: assessing mood, cognition, and withdrawal using animal models of addiction and brain-wide neural activity markers
Fentanyl overdose is responsible for nearly 75,000 deaths each year in the U.S. and causes severe psychological, physical, financial, and social harm. Despite existing treatments, fentanyl addiction remains difficult to overcome due to the chronic and complex nature of fentanyl addiction which contributes to patterns of chronic use and high relapse rates. This is partly due to fentanyl’s ability to rewire the brain’s reward and executive cognitive system to cause lasting changes in mood and cognition while also triggering intense withdrawal symptoms that drive continued use. To better understand the widespread impact of fentanyl on the brain, this project uses mouse models of addiction to explore the effects of fentanyl on various brain regions and neural populations involved in reward, motivation, mood, and cognition. Using artificial intelligence-guided behavioral and cellular analyses, we then correlate these neural signatures to mouse behaviors during withdrawal and a cognitive working memory task. We will then test whether two promising emerging treatments, semaglutide and ketamine, can improve cognition, withdrawal symptoms, or mood in mice exposed to fentanyl. Through this, we will contribute to our understanding of how fentanyl exerts its negative effects which can inform the development of more effective therapies for its devastating impact.
Substance Use Disorder assessment tools in jails & prisons: a systematic review
Over 65% of people who are incarcerated have a substance use disorder (SUD). Many jails and prisons provide substance use treatment, including behavioral and pharmacotherapy, and SUD identification is the first step. Prisons and jails are a distinct setting for SUD assessment, and tools used for SUD screening in community settings may not perform the same way in carceral settings. This systematic review will identify psychometric evaluation studies in carceral settings of screening and diagnostic tools for SUDs, generally, or specific SUDs (excluding alcohol and nicotine). Additionally, will use and adapt an existing clinical usability scale and develop new metrics to assess acceptability of screening tool use in carceral settings for a person-centered evaluation. This will be guided by further analysis of interviews with prison staff and people with lived experience of incarceration. The additional assessments will capture potential barriers and facilitators to SUD assessment in jails and prisons as they represent resource-limited settings with unique challenges compared to other health systems. The goals for the study are: 1) to help carceral facilities make informed decisions about SUD assessment, 2) to reveal key gaps in the literature, and 3) to inform the development and testing of future tools.
