Kaileigh Byrne
Clemson University, SC·Psychology
People who are struggling often get help too late, or the help on offer does not fit them. That is true of college students under heavy stress and of hospital patients whose drinking caused their medical problems.
- Fields
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
alcohol use disorder
peer recovery coaching
randomized controlled trial
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Determine whether the RC-Link inpatient peer recovery coaching program reduces heavy drinking and improves remission and daily functioning in patients hospitalized with alcohol use disorder, compared with controls in a randomized trial.
- Examine how daily changes in perceived social support and self-efficacy (confidence in staying sober) affect alcohol use, using ecological momentary assessment (brief daily phone surveys), and whether these links differ between trial groups.
- Evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the RC-Link peer recovery coaching program, with hospital readmissions and emergency department use as secondary outcomes.
- Assess the translation potential of a virtual human coach built on psychologist-vetted responses for delivering safe, personalized well-being coaching to college students, through I-Corps interviews with people across the industry.
More about the research
This research tests coaching-based support that reaches people at a key moment and adapts to them. One project uses peer recovery coaches for hospitalized patients with alcohol use disorder. The other uses a virtual coach to offer on-demand support to college students.
Why it matters
Patients hospitalized for alcohol-related illness often return to heavy drinking and are readmitted. A hospital-initiated peer coaching program that proves effective and cost-effective could become a practical model of AUD care that hospitals can adopt. Separately, a safe virtual coach could let universities offer on-demand well-being support to every student without hiring proportionally more staff, which could help student retention.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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.
Robert Miranda
Brown University, RI·Psychology·Early-career
Develop and collect pilot data on an integrated digital health platform built on gold-standard psychosocial interventions for treating alcohol use disorder among adolescents, aiming to widen access to evidence-based care.
Michael Arthur Russell
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Public Health & Epidemiology
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.
The school
Clemson University: 19 labs on PI Pages, $339M a year on research, 297 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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