Michael Vuolo
Ohio State University, OH·Public Health & Epidemiology
Over recent decades, disasters such as hurricanes, floods and wildfires have become more frequent, more intense and more costly. Over the same period, drug overdoses, drug-related illness and dependence have risen sharply.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
disasters
substance use
drug overdose
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Estimate how disaster declarations from the FEMA Disaster Declaration Database affect county-level drug-related deaths and drug arrests, using quasi-experimental designs that compare counties over time with CDC mortality and FBI Uniform Crime Reports data.
- Test whether disasters change individual drug use and treatment gaps through psychological distress, treatment disruption or drug market disruption, using National Survey on Drug Use and Health data within a Big Events framework.
- Map how disaster effects on substance use spread across time and space and differ by county and individual characteristics, and release a public county-by-month database of nearly 50 years of U.S. disasters.
More about the research
Disasters are known to harm physical and mental health. Whether they also drive drug use is unclear, because past studies mostly looked at single events, such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, using samples that are hard to generalize. This project asks, across the whole United States and many decades, whether disasters worsen substance use outcomes, and through which pathways.
Why it matters
Knowing whether and how disasters drive overdose deaths and drug use could help emergency planners and public health agencies decide where and when to send resources after future disasters. Examples include restoring disrupted addiction treatment or addressing distress in hard-hit communities. A public 50-year county-by-month disaster database could also support research on other health outcomes.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Arnab Ghosh
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Test whether extreme heat events raise county-level COVID-19 risk nationwide, combining Johns Hopkins case data, census data and National Weather Service records from 2020–2022 in spatiotemporal models with quasi-experimental designs.
Tessa Bonney
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Define measures of employment precarity and employment variability, including job changes and gaps in work, and describe how they change over time using the NLSY79 and NLSY97 national survey cohorts.
Hillary Samples
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Public Health & Epidemiology
Assess trends from 2016-2025 in near-fatal and fatal overdose events among Medicaid-enrolled youth aged 12-29, broken out by drugs involved and intent and by age group spanning early adolescence through early adulthood.
The school
Ohio State University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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