Andrea Graham
Northwestern University, IL·Psychology
Many people who need help with eating, weight or mood never receive it. Face-to-face care is limited, waitlists are long, and treatments often fail to fit people's changing needs.
- Fields
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
binge eating
obesity
weight loss
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Identify which of five evidence-based treatment targets in the FoodSteps mobile program reduce binge eating for which adults with obesity, by randomly delivering one target to each user every week in a 16-week micro-randomized trial.
- Determine the most effective sequence of FoodSteps treatment targets for reducing weekly binge eating and long-term weight, using repeated weekly randomization.
- Test whether offering a weekly target as a recommendation users can choose, or as an assigned target, better drives behavior change, and use changing user traits to inform a future just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI).
- Adapt a digital mental health platform and service model to fit the work of care managers in Northwestern Medicine's Ambulatory Care Coordination service, and develop a multi-part implementation strategy.
- Run a randomized rollout trial testing both effectiveness and implementation of the digital depression platform across four regional care coordination teams, followed by a sustainment pilot and an implementation guide for other health systems.
More about the research
This work uses digital tools, delivered by phone or online, to make effective behavioral and mental health care easier to reach. It also studies how to personalize these tools and fit them into real health systems. One project fine-tunes a mobile program for binge eating and obesity. The other brings a digital depression tool into the daily work of hospital care managers.
Why it matters
Adults with obesity and binge eating, and patients with depression in care-coordination programs, often cannot get timely, fitting care. This work could produce a phone-based program that delivers the right behavior-change strategy to the right person at the right time. It could also give health systems a tested guide for adding digital depression care to existing services. That could widen access to evidence-based mental health care without depending on scarce face-to-face therapists.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Carmina Valle
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether a 6-month mHealth weight-loss program tailored to adolescent and young adult cancer survivors produces greater weight loss at 6 months than a self-guided program, in a nationwide randomized trial of 240 survivors.
Carlos Grilo
Yale University, CT·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether behavioral weight loss, the medication naltrexone/bupropion, or both reduce loss-of-control eating and improve weight in 160 post-bariatric-surgery patients, using a 16-week double-blind, placebo-controlled 2×2 trial.
Stephen Schueller
University of California-Irvine, CA·Psychology
Test whether digital cognitive behavioral therapy delivered with peer support improves depression and anxiety outcomes compared with the same platform used alone, among Spanish-speaking Latinx patients in safety-net primary care.
The school
Northwestern University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 536 research doctorates a year.
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