Research Collaborators
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| Melina Bersamin, Ph.D. |
Human Development |
| Risky sexual behavior; ethnic differences; ecological models; adolescent health behavior |
| Dr. Bersamin received a BA in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994 and completed her doctoral degree in Human Development at the University of California, Davis in 2001. Her previous research has focused on the cultural and ethnic differences in adolescent birth control use, risk and protective factors for risky adolescent sexual behavior, and examining the effectiveness of abstinence-only education on adolescent sexual behavior. Dr. Bersamin has also presented research examining ethnic differences in risk and protective factors for substance use among adolescents and young adults. |
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| Meng-Jinn Chen, Ph.D. |
Sociology |
| Underage drinking; college drinking; malt liquor; alcohol advertising; structural equations modeling |
| Dr. Chen’s work integrates both quantitative and qualitative research methods and centers on alcohol and other drug use and related health issues among adolescents and young adults. She is currently working on research projects investigating alcohol advertising influences on underage drinking and malt liquor use by college students. In addition, her current research focuses on modeling the complex dynamic processes through which parents, peers, and media simultaneously influence youth alcohol use over time. |
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| Robert Flewelling, Ph.D. |
Health Behavior Epidemiology |
| Epidemiology; evaluation; study design; community-based interventions; risk factors |
| Dr. Robert Flewelling is a Senior Research Scientist with the Chapel Hill Center of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE). He earned his Doctorate in Health Behavior and Health Education, with a minor in Epidemiology, from the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Flewelling’s research interests and experience focus primarily on epidemiological studies of adolescent high risk behaviors, prevention program evaluation, application and evaluation of community-based prevention strategies, and empirically-based approaches to state and community prevention system development and program selection. He recently completed an evaluation of a multi-site community-based substance abuse prevention project in Vermont, is currently the Principal Investigator on a grant to examine multiple predictors of adolescent substance use based on the National Household Survey of Drug Abuse, and contributes to the conceptualization, study design, and data analysis on a number of prevention research projects currently ongoing within PIRE. |
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| Harold Holder, Ph.D. |
Sociology/Epidemiology |
| Alcohol policy; community prevention; treatment costs/benefits |
| Dr. Harold D. Holder is a Senior Research Scientist and former Director of the Prevention Research Center. He has explored two major alcohol research areas: prevention of alcohol problems, and the cost and benefits of alcoholism treatment. Dr. Holder directed a major community prevention trial to reduce alcohol-involved injuries and worked with similar projects in several countries, utilizing environmental strategies. He was one of the first researchers to undertake controlled studies on the economic benefits of alcoholism treatment. |
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| Juliet Lee, Ph.D. |
Anthropology |
| Ethnicity and substance use; ethnography; policy analysis; alcohol, tobacco and other drugs; neighborhood influences on substance use |
| Juliet Lee, Ph.D., received her doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Virginia and is a Research Anthropologist at the Prevention Research Center. She has a primary interest in the relationships between substance use, locale and ethnicity, with a secondary interest in the local-level implementation of public policies related to substance use. Her current projects include a comparison of tobacco use norms and practices of first- and second-generation Southeast Asians in the U.S.; a study of the social construction of drugs and drug use among ethnic minority youth; an investigation of the role of ethnicity in the implementation of tobacco control policies; and a study of tobacco control policies across several California municipalities. Additionally, Dr. Lee works with local service providers and coalitions to develop, implement and evaluate community-based preventive interventions in the areas of substance use, youth violence, and preventive health. |
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| William Ponicki, M.A. |
Economy |
| Alcohol availability; alcohol policies and regulations; economic determinants of drinking; econometric analysis; spatial statistics |
| Associate Research Scientist Bill Ponicki holds Master’s degrees in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley and in Public Policy Studies from the University of Chicago. His work has focused on econometric analyses explaining alcohol consumption and related problems such as traffic fatalities, cirrhosis, assaults, murder and suicide. These analyses estimate the influence of policy variables such as alcohol taxes, outlet densities, minimum legal drinking age, sales-hour restrictions, DUI penalties, and other regulations. The analyses also control for non-policy factors affecting drinking such as demographic and economic characteristics of the population, as well as market forces affecting the selling of alcohol. He has extensive experience with appropriate statistical methods for panel data, limited dependent variables, simultaneous equations, and spatially autocorrelated data. He has also served as software designer for S3, an in-house programming package for estimating spatial statistics. |
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| Christopher Ringwalt, Dr.P.H. |
Public Health |
| Substance abuse prevention, adolescents, program evaluation, program fidelity, school-based prevention |
| Dr. Ringwalt directs the Chapel Hill Center of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE). He has experience in the design, development, analysis, and reporting of epidemiological, etiological, and evaluation studies relating to public health issues. Notable projects include evaluation of school-based AOD preventions, community-based violence prevention programs, and State Incentive Grant for North Carolina’s ATOD prevention needs, including the following projects: Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), Project SUCCESS, and Project ALERT. His research interests focus primarily on the prevention of adolescent and adult risk behaviors, particularly violence and alcohol, tobacco, and other drug (ATOD) use, and ATOD use and other risk behaviors among runaway and homeless youth (DHHS and NIDA). He has also studied the development of ethnic identity in African-American male adolescents (for CDC), adolescent dating violence, and drug prevention in managed care settings (for CSAP). |
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| Michael Todd, Ph.D. |
Health Psychology |
| Daily data; stress and coping; alcohol use; smoking; multilevel modeling |
| Dr. Todd is a social psychologist whose work has focused on daily processes in stress, mood, and coping and their relations to various behavioral outcomes. The major purpose of his research is twofold: to understand how daily and within-day associations among stress, coping, and variables such as alcohol use, smoking, and sexual behavior unfold over time; and to understand potential between-person differences in these micro-longitudinal associations. He has used multilevel regression techniques extensively in analyzing daily process data. In addition, he is currently involved in work examining the impact of physical availability of alcohol on trajectories of alcohol use and alcohol-related problems among adolescents. Projects under development include an examination of how social network characteristics interact with peer influence variables in predicting adolescent tobacco use and a multi-wave daily process study of acute and chronic stress as predictors of food choice, weight gain, and changes in fat distribution among adolescents. |
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