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Current Fellows of the Training Program

Since its inception in 1987, 90 fellows have completed one or more years of post-doctoral training in our program.

2006

Christopher AhnAllen received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2006. His research interests include the examination of how neuropsychological factors, including attention, interact with cigarette smoking behavior and nicotine levels in psychiatric populations. Primarily, he is invested in understanding the relationship between cigarette smoking behavior and persons with serious mental illness, namely schizophrenia spectrum disorders. He will be examining cognitive functioning in this population to assess areas for treatment improvement of nicotine and other addictions.

John Hustad received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Syracuse University in 2006. His research interests include college student alcohol use, empirically supported treatments, behavioral economics, and biological markers of alcohol use. John seeks to investigate mechanisms of behavioral change following the completion of commonly used alcohol prevention programs designed for college students.

Lance Swenson received his Ph.D. in clinical and developmental psychology from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2006. His primary research interests involve the influences of adolescents' social relationships on the development of maladaptive behavior (e.g., suicidality, substance use). As a postdoctoral fellow he is also gaining experience with behavioral genetic approaches to characterizing psychopathology.

Leila Tarokh received her Ph.D. in Psychology with an emphasis in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of California, Irvine in March 2006. Her primary research interest is in the use neuroimaging techniques, such as electroencephalograph (EEG), to study the effect of alcohol use on both sleep and waking states. She is also interested in the impact that a parental history of alcohol abuse has on sleep and cortical function of children and adolescents.

2007

Christy Capone received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Rhode Island in 2007. Her primary research interests are in behavioral and pharmacologic treatments for alcohol use disorders, etiological risk factors (e.g. familial alcoholism) for alcohol dependence, and the application of advanced statistical modeling techniques. Christy is interested in translating her background in the provision of brief motivational interventions with college students to a different at-risk population, returning veterans. She is currently in the process of writing an R01 application to conduct a randomized placebo-controlled trial of quetiapine and a brief intervention in a sample of returning veterans with comorbid PTSD and alcohol abuse/dependence. Additionally, she is planning to examine mediators and moderators of treatment outcomes.
 
Travis Cook received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of California, San Diego/San Diego State University Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology in 2007. His primary research interest is in the use of mindfulness and distress tolerance techniques to improve the efficacy of treatment for substance use disorders. He is interested in the effects of stress, affect regulation and information processing on relapse following treatment for substance use disorders. He has studied genetic and environmental risk factors in the etiology of substance use disorders and he plans to investigate how individual differences in affect regulation influence the development of addiction in college students.
 
John Hayes received a Ph.D. in Nutrition and a certificate in Quantitative Research Methods (Psychology) from the University of Connecticut in 2007. His research interests revolve around the psychobiology of ingestive behavior. His prior work focused on how oral sensory phenotypes relate to differences in the sensations from foods and beverages, and how these differences may drive liking, and ultimately, intake. He plans to continue this work at the Center, expanding it to include potential interactions between liking and reward, especially in the context of behavioral genetics.
 
Lynn Hernandez received her Ph.D. in Life-Span Developmental Psychology from Florida International University in 2007. Her primary research interests focus on understanding the roles psychosocial developmental variables and cultural factors play in adolescents’ substance use trajectories. She is also interested in understanding how such variables moderate treatment outcomes in order to examine the developmental and cultural appropriateness of interventions for adolescents. As a postdoctoral fellow she is interested in making cultural adaptations to an intervention for substance using Hispanic/Latino adolescents.
 
Bettina Hoeppner received her Ph.D. in experimental Psychology in 2007 and her M.S. in Statistics in 2005, both from the University of Rhode Island. Her primary research interest is the use of advanced longitudinal methodology in understanding and documenting addictive behavior and its change, including both nomothetic and idiographic approaches. She is interested in studying the complex relationship of important substance use factors on the population level measured over few measurements of time, as well as the more fine-grained analyses possible when behaviors and related factors are tracked more closely over time.  During her postdoctoral fellowship, Bettina seeks to complement her training in addictive behavior.  Much of her previous work has focused on smoking prevention and cessation, and she will expand this training to gain a better understanding of other addictive behaviors, particularly alcohol use, and the factors associated with them.
 
Adam Leventhal received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from University of Houston in 2007.  His primary research interest is in affective and motivational processes underlying addiction.  His work integrates clinical, cognitive, and physiological psychology approaches to understand the etiology of drug use motivation, with a specific focus on nicotine and stimulant use disorders.  He is currently developing a NIDA K08 application to study affective and pharmacogentic factors underlying stimulant abuse vulnerability.  
 
Molly Magill received her Ph.D. in Social Work Research from Boston College in 2007.  Her primary research area is treatment process in psychosocial intervention with adult substance use disorders.  Molly has a particular interest in examining mechanisms of action in evidence-based treatments, and distinguishing elements of treatment process that are model specific from those that are common to intervention with substance using populations.  As a postdoctoral fellow, Molly will focus on measurement of alcohol treatment process through observational coding systems.

Lara Ray received her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007, after completing her predoctoral clinical internship at the Brown University Clinical Psychology Training Consortium. During her graduate training, Dr. Ray completed a graduate program in behavioral genetics through the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Ray’s program of research focuses on psychosocial and genetic factors underlying the risk for the development of substance use disorders by focusing primarily on alcohol endophenotypes. Dr. Ray is especially interested in applying human laboratory paradigms, such as alcohol administration and cue-exposure, to examine the biobehavioral mechanisms of action of novel pharmacotherapies for alcoholism and to evaluate the role of genetic factors in determining who responds to a given pharmacotherapy and by which mechanisms.

Kristen Stone received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, in 2007. Kristen is interested in the causal relationships between sleep problems and addiction to cocaine and other drugs. Her current research focuses on sleeping difficulties in children and adolescents with prenatal drug exposure. She is working to obtain pilot data to support an exploratory grant for research on the causal pathways among sleep problems, prenatal drug exposure, and negative developmental outcomes. She is also interested in investigating the association between sleep and relapse in new mothers in early remission from cocaine dependence. These research projects are her initial efforts towards a primary, long-term research goal of understanding whether or not good sleep decreases vulnerability to cocaine and other drug addictions.