The National Institute of Health awarded the Geisel School of Medicine’s Center for Technology and Behavioral Health a $5 million grant for research regarding motivation and self-regulation of behaviors, specifically as it pertains to smoking and obesity.
Geisel psychiatry chair and co-investigator Alan Green said that the two areas of smoking and obesity will be emphasized due to their importance for overall health.
Center director and principal investigator for the project Lisa Marsch said that the research will also identify the best ways to measure health behavior changes, as well as how to provide interventions to support those changes across different populations and communities. As the principal investigator, Marsch will be responsible for the entirety of the project, and she invited Stanford University psychology professor and Stanford Neurosciences Institute member Russell Poldrack to work with her.
Marsch said that Poldrack will be responsible for the imaging process, which uses a technique called functional MRI, during which participants are put in an MRI scanner and participate in a variety of psychological tasks while their brain activity is monitored and recorded.
The process will test a variety of types of self-control so researchers can evaluate to what extent the tests create activity in different sets of brain networks.
Poldrack said that he initially considered applying for the grant himself through Stanford, but that he realized the College and Stanford had complementary interests and strengths, making them a good pair to work together.
His lab at Stanford has spent significant time developing ontologies, or descriptions of all of the different processes in a particular domain, along with the imaging process, whereas Marsch’s lab focuses on the mobile health aspect and translating that into real-world applications, Poldrack said.
He said that he hopes the project will be able to bring together the various ideas of self-regulation that exist across psychology, examine the ways in which they are related and ultimately generate a unified understanding of self-control.
“There are people across different sub-fields that talk about things where they use different names but may well be talking about the same things, such as, when studying obesity, studying people’s ability to overcome temptation to eat versus how people stop themselves from making the motor movements,” Poldrack said.
The CTBH is a research center funded by the NIH that uses scientific research to develop technology-based therapeutic tools for behavioral issues, such as medication adherence or mental health.
One example is a digital therapy for substance use that assists people in identifying how they can effectively change drug taking behavior, Marsch said.
The project will also include individuals at Arizona State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the money being divided between the CTBH and the other institutions. Each school will have its own individual work to do, such as data collection on mobile devices in their respective areas, Marsch said.
Marsch said that the grant will allow the center to expand its research from individuals to population samples, which will be assisted by efforts of the other schools located throughout the country.
“Our charge has always been to ensure that science informs the best way to create and deploy these types of tools and to develop empirical frameworks around careful and systematic health applications. I think we started at that level, and this is a wonderful opportunity for us to expand those activities to a much broader population level focus,” she said.
The CTBH initially applied for the funding through a competition from the NIH Common Fund. The grant will be distributed in two installations over a five-year period.
