Research Grants Awarded

Dr. Bryan, Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology, and Dr. Butner, Professor in Social Psychology, were recently awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health. The grant will support their research “Identifying suicidal subtypes and dynamic indicators of increasing and decreasing suicide risk”. 

Congratulations Dr. Bryan and Dr. Butner!

Project Narrative

The proposed project addresses several priority research objectives identified by the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention’s (NAASP) Research Prioritization Task Force focused on understanding why people become suicidal and identifying how we can better detect or predict risk. Results of this project will enable us to identify why some individuals with suicidal thoughts subsequently attempt suicide while others do not. In addition, our results will inform the development of new screening and risk monitoring methods that could signal which individuals are likely to shift to a higher risk state and when this shift is likely to occur, thereby providing a model for administering the right intervention to the right person at the right time.

Dr. Baucom, Research Assistant Professor, Clinical Psychology, received an NIH Clinical Research Loan Repayment Program Renewal Award from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases or NIDDK (for 2018-2020).

She also received an National Institute of Health K23 from National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, a 5-year career development award for her project entitled Couple-based lifestyle intervention to prevent type 2 diabetes. Tim Smith is her primary mentor on the award. Other mentors are Lauren Clark (nursing) and Debra Simmons (internal medicine).

Congratulations Dr. Baucom!

Dr. Jeanine Stefanucci, Associate Professor, Cognition and Neural Science, and
Dr. Sarah Creem-Regehr, Professor, Cognition and Neural Science, were awarded a National Science Foundation Grant from the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering. Their project is entitled "Designing Virtual Worlds for Children: A Developmental Study of How Children Act, Perceive, and Reason Spatially."

The recent dramatic increase in performance and decrease in cost of virtual environments (VEs) holds the potential for transformative improvements in the teaching of spatial reasoning and thinking skills central to STEM education. However, we currently know very little about child-specific perception, action, and cognition in VEs, and key questions need to be answered before drawing generalizable conclusions about how best to use VEs for this audience. In particular, how do changes to a child's cognitive and physical abilities, which are rapid in the age range where it is desirable to start focusing on teaching spatial reasoning skills, affect the performance and utility of VE-based interaction?

Congratulations Dr. Stefanucci and Dr. Creem-Regehr!

Dr. Drew, Assistant Professor, Cognition and Neural Science,
was awarded an R01 from the National Institutes of Health, entitled “Reader Accuracy in Pathology Interpretation and Diagnosis: Perception and Cognition (RAPID-PC)

Every pathologist wants to be better at their job and find every suspicious lesion, but when they do make errors, it can be hard to know why. This grant is a collaborative effort with pathologists at UCLA and U Vermont where will use advanced eye-tracking techniques that measure exactly where the pathologist was looking during each case so that we can determine what led to the error and gain a better understanding as to why errors occur, and how expertise may protect us against certain types of errors. The 5 year project will involve traveling between 10 participating sites to collect data from residents during their first 3 years of training. 

Congratulations Dr. Drew!