Principal Investigator: Gene Brody
Funding Agencies: NIDA
Project Period: 2014-2019
Through a P30 grant, the National Institute on Drug Abuse funded the creation of The Center for Translational and Prevention Science (CTAPS), a Core Center of Excellence, within the Center for Family Research. This project was a collaborative research effort that worked to improve the lives of rural African American families through innovative, transdisciplinary research on the relationship between stress, stress biology, and substance use. A central question was, in what ways does stress “get under the skin” to influence individuals’ development and increase vulnerability to drug use and sexual risk behaviors?
More specifically, the project worked to gain a better understanding of the development of drug use and sexual risk behavior among children, adolescents, and young adults. Most of the research about these important public health concerns has focused primarily on the environmental contexts in which youth spend time: families, peer groups, neighborhoods, and schools. An impressive body of research has been generated that describes how these influences either deter or create risks for drug use and sexual risk behavior. Other important factors, however, were missing, ones that are critical for understanding why some youth abstain from risk behavior and others develop serious problems that can lead to drug abuse and sexually transmitted infections including HIV. These factors are invisible to the naked eye because they take place “under the skin” of children and youth through inflammatory, neuro-endocrine, and neurocognitive systems change as children and youth adapt to stress. CTAPS research examined children and youths’ social worlds in concert with inflammatory and neuroscience systems to provide new insights into the development of drug use and abuse and risky behavior. CTAPS was a transdisciplinary effort that included a team of scientists from departments of Psychology, Prevention Science, Public Health, Social Work, and Psychiatry. These investigators were located in universities throughout North American including the University of Georgia, Emory University, Northwestern University, the University of California -Los Angeles, the University of Houston, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, McMaster University (Canada), the University of North Carolina, the University of Iowa, and Howard University.
CTAPS was supported by P30DA027827 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and by the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Georgia.