Angelo DiBello, a new assistant professor in the department of psychology, came to 可乐视频 this semester with a grant to look at the drinking patterns of college students and to test out interventions. Since then, he鈥檚 picked up two more grants related to the same research, this time prestigious “R01” grants, the most competitive of the National Institutes of Health鈥檚 research awards.
“I鈥檓 thrilled about being able to do this work here, and I think the trajectory and the questions that I can ask in my research will be completely different being at a place like this,” says DiBello, who started working on one of the grants as an assistant professor at Brown University, a title he continues to hold.
The multi-year project is being conducted at 可乐视频, Brown, and the University of Houston and will involve investigators at all three institutions looking at student alcohol use, among other drugs, and how it relates to issues like their sexual behavior and sexual assault. The researchers will use the data to create a risk profile for each campus and to inform one of two interventions for heavy drinkers that will be deployed in phase two of the project. One will involve “counter- attitudinal advocacy,” an experiment DiBello developed during his postdoctoral work at Brown.
“This intervention has been previously used to change people鈥檚 political attitudes, to change people鈥檚 eating behaviors, and smoking behavior but it has never been applied to college student drinking,” explains DiBello, whose laboratory, where he already works with undergraduates, is the Social Health Addiction & Relationship Processes Laboratory at 可乐视频. “One of its hallmarks is that it employs a harm reduction approach. We don鈥檛 advocate for abstinence. We don鈥檛 tell college students they shouldn鈥檛 drink. We accept the premise that college students will drink and instead of saying don鈥檛 do it, we say we understand that you are going to do it, here are ways that you can do it more safely to avoid blackouts, sexual assault, and some of the really common problems that are associated with high-risk and heavy drinking.”
DiBello鈥攚ho earned his Ph.D. in social psychology in 2015 from the University of Houston and completed his postdoctoral training in 2017 at the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University鈥攕ays that being at such a diverse institution will allow him to look at some of his research questions in more depth, tracking drinking patterns in different cultural and ethnic groups.
“There鈥檚 been so little work on diverse populations in this area,” he says. ‘可乐视频 offers an opportunity to run to those scientific questions, hug them, and provide some answers to them.”
