天美传媒

David Lydon-Staley is an Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Lydon-Staley鈥檚 research focuses on the unfolding of human behavior over short timescales (e.g., moment-to-moment, day-to-day) during the course of everyday life. The ebb and flow of momentary behavior may seem inconsequential, but the minutiae of everyday life, once tallied up over time, become the foundation for more enduring changes in our behavior, environment, and biology that occur on longer (e.g., years, decades) timescales. With this focus on short-term (on the daily or even finer timescales) dynamics in behavior, his research focuses on substance use, emotion regulation, and curiosity across the lifespan, with a particular focus on adolescence. He makes use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), experimental laboratory paradigms, and experience sampling methodologies coupled with intensive-longitudinal data and network analysis techniques.

Lydon-Staley鈥檚 work has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Jacobs Foundation, the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, the Center for Curiosity, and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. He received his bachelor鈥檚 degree in Psychology and English Literature from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and his Ph.D. in Human Development & Family Studies from The Pennsylvania State University. Before joining Annenberg, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Complex Systems Lab of Professor Danielle Bassett in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Leslie Leve is best known for her research on child and adolescent development, gene-environment interplay, and interventions for underserved children, families, and communities. This includes preventive intervention studies with youth in foster care or juvenile justice system, adoption studies that examine the interplay between biological and social influences on development, and COVID-19 testing outreach programs for Latinx communities. 

She co-directs a Center on parenting in the context of opioid use. Her work also focuses on outcomes for girls and women. To date, she has published more than 190 scientific articles and 20 book chapters. Her research has been funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Justice, and the U.S. Department of Education.

Sean Grant completed his doctorate in social intervention as a Clarendon Scholar at the Centre for Evidence-Based Intervention, University of Oxford. His scholarship aims to promote the use of scientific evidence to inform policymaking and programmatic decisions across various health and social sectors. As a research associate professor with the HEDCO Institute for Evidence-Based Educational Practice at the University of Oregon, Grant specializes in methods for synthesizing research evidence and expert opinion on 鈥渨hat works鈥� in addressing pressing societal issues. His work on these methods also involves collaborative, translational research focused on specific topics, such as substance use and mental health. 

Thomas Stopka is an Epidemiologist and Professor with the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. Through his research, Dr. Stopka explores the interconnectedness of substance use, social and behavioral risk factors, and overdose and infectious disease outcomes among high-risk and often hidden populations through community-engaged, interdisciplinary, multi-methods, applied epidemiological research studies. His major research interests focus on the overlap substance use, infectious disease (HCV, HIV, and STIs), and opioid overdose. He employs qualitative, biostatistical, geographic information systems (GIS), spatial epidemiological, and laboratory approaches in his studies to assess the risk landscape, access to health services, and implement and test public health and clinical interventions to address health disparities. Stopka is currently a multi-Principal Investigator (MPI) on three National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)-funded studies that aim to: 1) Predict future opioid overdoses in Massachusetts employing Bayesian spatiotemporal models to inform pre-emptive public health responses; 2) determine the best timing for extended-release medications (XR-Buprenorphine) for opioid use disorder among incarcerated people in Massachusetts; and 3) assess the effectiveness of a mobile telemedicine-based hepatitis C treatment intervention among rural people who inject drugs. He is also a Co-Investigator on the National Institute of Health (NIH)-funded HEALing Communities Study to reduce opioid overdose deaths in Massachusetts, in which he is leading GIS and spatial epidemiological analyses. These and other studies that Stopka is working on employ: 1) ethnographic and qualitative approaches to assess contextual factors tied to salient exposures and outcomes of interest and to generate hypotheses; 2) innovative epidemiological, legal, and policy scans to assess substance use-related morbidity and mortality and health services landscape; 3) spatiotemporal methods to explore the distribution of measures that affect risk, and to determine the geolocation of and access to current services, as well as gaps; and, 4) Bayesian spatiotemporal dynamic modeling approaches to inform small area forecasting of opioid-related mortality.