PIPages
Labs

Kimberly Mallett

Pennsylvania State University, PA·Psychology

College students drink more often and more heavily than peers who are not in college, and they are more likely to develop alcohol use disorder (AUD). Heavy drinking does not fade as students advance; seniors drink more and experience more consequences than younger students.

Fields

Psychology

Public Health & Epidemiology

Topics

alcohol use

college drinking

binge drinking

Grants
1 known grant, through Jun 2028

What they work on

  1. 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.
  2. Compare risky drinking, alcohol-related consequences and alcohol use disorder symptoms six months after eCHECKUP TO GO plus TAC feedback versus eCHECKUP TO GO alone, in students from all four class years.
  3. Deliver motivational interviewing sessions that show students their own TAC rise rates and peak intoxication from recent drinking events, to encourage strategies that lower these measures.

More about the research

Brief online feedback that compares a student's drinking with that of peers can reduce drinking. It is unclear whether this alone prevents long-term problems, or whether adding personal biological data could make it work better.

Why it matters

Heavy drinking that persists through college can grow into chronic alcohol problems. A brief intervention that uses wearable alcohol sensor data to show students how quickly and how intensely they become intoxicated could help reduce risky drinking, harmful consequences and the risk of alcohol use disorder among high-risk college students in every class year.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

An examination of the feasibility of a brief personalized alcohol biomarker feedback intervention for high-risk college students

NIH · Jul 2026 – Jun 2028

Closest labs

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.

Vivian Go

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology

Test whether the brief alcohol intervention (BAI), counseling based on Motivational Interviewing and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, improves PrEP persistence and adherence in a randomized trial of 564 PrEP users with unhealthy drinking in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Laura Seewald

University of Michigan, MI·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career

Adapt SafERteens, a health-coach-delivered ED brief intervention using motivational interviewing and cognitive skill-building, into MiGuide for young adults aged 18–30, refining it step by step with community input.

The school

Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.

More about Pennsylvania State University

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