Riding a wave of grant funding, HeadsUP Labs in Loyola Marymount University’s Psychological Science Department now has six active grant projects totaling over $ 11 million, five of which have been awarded in the past year. The HeadsUp team, led by Joseph LaBrie, Ph.D., is engaged in exploring innovative approaches to address substance use issues, via parents, social media, and the gamification of social norms approaches with college students and underrepresented groups such as LBGTQ-identified women and with persons in recovery from a substance use disorder.
“We are excited that NIH, and specifically NIAAA and NIDA, have determined that our proposed projects will have high impact on the various topics and with the populations we are studying,” said LaBrie, professor of psychology and principal investigator on all the research projects, whose works focuses on the causes, prevention, and intervention of risk behaviors including alcohol abuse, drug use, risky sexual behavior, and violence. “We believe that our work is innovative in its use of technology and best-practice research methodologies so that the time from effective trials to larger-scale implementation will be shortened.”
HeadsUP started as a campus-wide responsible drinking project with a mission to promote a safe and healthy lifestyle among all students and to intervene with high-risk students to reduce dangerous levels of drinking and the incidence of problems resulting from heavy consumption. It sought to change campus cultures with respect to drinking by involving students, student leaders, faculty, staff, and parents in a comprehensive alcohol awareness and prevention program. Recently, HeadsUP has begun to focus on newer populations with the same goals of reducing risks associated with heavy drinking and substance use.
The five newly funded HeadsUP studies include:
- A five-year app-based research project for more than $3 million, working with parents of students transitioning from high school into college to reduce alcohol, drug, and negative sexual experience risk
- A three-year grant for $620,568 for a project titled “Digitally Prompted Parenting: A Text Message Parent-Based Alcohol Intervention for Incoming College Students.”
- A five-year award of $2.6 million for a project titled “Feasibility and Effectiveness of Gamified Digital Intervention to Prevent Alcohol and Mental Health Risks,” that delivers social norms risk-reducing feedback in a fun social-media inspired game among a national sample of LGBTQ-identified women.
- A three-year award of $620,569 from the NIH for a project titled “2 College Truths & 1 Lie: Social Media Embedded Gamified Normative Re-education.” The aim is to prevent heavy drinking via a game delivered with ads on Instagram to college students.
- A $2 million small business grant to make the app PinkCloud the foremost app promoting recovery post-treatment for persons with substance use disorders.
The HeadsUP team includes LaBrie as principal investigator, Sarah Boyle and Brad Trager, who are co-PIs each on one of the grants, and Layla Rainosek, Oliver Hatch, and Jordan Oster. The five-year project with parents also includes a sub-award to Lucy Kilp, Ph.D., of Lehigh University, who worked at LMU as a postdoc in with HeadsUP labs, showing the growing lineage of the program.
The team is currently completing a five-year $2.2 million project titled “Revolutionizing Normative Re-Education: Delivering Enhanced PNF within a Social Media Inspired Game About College Life,” and the preliminary results show the game was successfully in reducing alcohol risk during the high-risk period of the transition from high school to college.
That all six projects have been vetted, reviewed, and considered to have a high impact on the field and funded is a remarkable achievement, LaBrie said. Each submission is over 200 pages and often must be resubmitted two or three times after review periods to complete the long and grueling path to funding.
“I am very grateful to my team, particularly Sarah Boyle and Brad Trager, for all of their efforts in helping develop, design, and write these proposals.,” said LaBrie. “We never imagined all would be funded. Now that they have, we have great work to get to!”
