Seema Clifasefi, PhD, and Raphe Bernier, PhD, both received funding for a 2018 Academic/Community Partnership Award given by the Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) Pilot Translational and Clinical Studies program. Academic/Community Partnership Award given by the Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) Pilot Translational and Clinical Studies program. The purpose of the award is to encourage the development and support of collaborations between academic and community investigators.

Dr. Clifasefi’s project, Clinical Implementation and Dissemination of the Life Enhancing Alcohol-management Program (LEAP), will build on an existing community-academic research partnership with Housing First residents, staff and management of the Downtown Emergency Service Center. The LEAP was co-developed & implemented in the context of this partnership, and has shown promise in reducing alcohol related harm and improving quality of life for Housing First residents with lived experience of homelessness and alcohol use problems. In the proposed project, Dr. Clifasefi and her team will document the partnership’s processes, and create and pilot a technical assistance package to build community capacity. Susan Collins, PhD, who co-directs the Harm Reduction Research and Treatment Center with Clifasefi, will serve as a co-Investigator, and Bonnie Duran, DrPH (School of Social Work) will serve as an academic collaborator. These efforts will allow the team to prepare for a multi-site cluster randomized controlled trial to more broadly test the LEAP’s impact on substance use, health, and quality of life outcomes.

The overall objective of Dr. Bernier’s project, A Parent‐Scientist Collaboration Using a Novel Mobile App to Advance the Phenotypic Profile for Individuals with Disruptive Mutations, is to advance the pace of precision medicine approaches within Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by interactively engaging family groups in the research process to better understand individuals falling within genetically defined subgroups and enhance their clinical trial involvement. The project will engage families who are part of genetic-variant family groups via the mobile application GroopIt.