Michael Arthur Russell
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Heavy drinking among young adults causes thousands of assaults, injuries and deaths each year, and about 13% of people this age meet criteria for alcohol use disorder (AUD), a condition whose problems often last into midlife. Studying these risks depends on measuring how much people drink.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
- Topics
alcohol use disorder
heavy episodic drinking
binge drinking
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Test whether TAC sensor features, namely rise rate, peak and rise duration of each day's alcohol curve, predict alcohol-related consequences on individual drinking days, compared with EMA phone self-reports, in 500 young adults.
- Test whether TAC features predict alcohol use disorder, diagnosed with DSM criteria at baseline, 12 and 24 months, better than self-reported drinking does, using eight 14-day measurement bursts over two years.
- Produce generalizable estimates of how strongly TAC features relate to drinking outcomes, using a large, long-term multimodal study of heavy-drinking young adults aged 19–22.
More about the research
Most studies ask people to count their own drinks, but those counts may be least accurate on the heaviest nights. In the team's pilot work, 70% of participants reported blackouts over 12 weekend days, and blackouts happened on about one in three drinking days.
Why it matters
Wearable alcohol sensors could give clinicians and researchers a more accurate picture of risky drinking than drink counts alone, especially on nights when memory fails. If sensor features predict injuries, other harmful consequences and the later onset of alcohol use disorder, they could help identify which college and non-college young adults are at highest risk and would benefit most from prevention.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kimberly Mallett
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Psychology
Assess the feasibility of adding personalized transdermal alcohol concentration (TAC) feedback, based on wearable skin sensors that track alcohol levels, to the eCHECKUP TO GO intervention for high-risk college drinkers.
Andre Miguel
Washington State University, WA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether rural smokers with alcohol use disorder who receive varenicline plus app-based contingency management submit more breathalyzer samples showing alcohol abstinence and non-heavy drinking days than those using a control app.
Cecilia Hinojosa
University of New Mexico, NM·Neuroscience·Early-career
Define sex differences in reward-related brain circuitry, including the striatum, that relate to alcohol craving and drinking in trauma-exposed women and men, using functional neuroimaging.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
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