DFI Mentored Junior Faculty Fellowship

Training the next generation is as critical as supporting the current generation.  For this reason, the Duncan Family Institute established its Mentored Junior Faculty Fellowship to support the earliest stages of a faculty member’s career and fill that critical gap in funding between a postdoctoral training position and a faculty tenure track position as the assistant professor level.  The research of our current fellows ranges from the neurobiology of addiction and the potential for new insights into effective tobacco cessation interventions to investigations into the factors that influence physical activity behaviors in Mexican American adolescents, which can serve to inform development of new interventions and public policies to promote adoption of healthy lifestyles.

Jian Wang, Ph.D., Instructor, Epidemiology
September 2011

“Risk modeling using mediation analysis and Bayesian network recovery with application to smoking cessation study”

Larkin Strong, Ph.D., Instructor, Health Disparities Research
August 2010 

"An ecological approach to cancer prevention: Reducing disparities in physical activity through research and action" 

Francesco Versace, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Behavioral Science 
March 2010 

"Putting smoking addiction in the affective context: Event-related potentials to emotional and neutral stimuli during a smoking cessation intervention”

Jian Wang, Ph.D.

“Risk modeling using mediation analysis and Bayesian network recovery with application to smoking cessation study”

There are evidences that cigarette smoking is associated with cancers of lung, oral cavity, bladder, kidney, pancreas, stomach, etc. Smoking cessation results in decreased incidence and mortality from cancers, and therefore, is an important component of cancer prevention. Despite ever-increasing anti-smoking legislation and social pressure, the proportion of successful smoking cessation attempts is still low. Over 40% of current smokers make a serious cessation attempt each year, but only less than 3% of them successfully quit. The success of smoking cessation is associated with various genetic risk factors (e.g. genes related to dopamine pathways and nicotinic receptors), pharmacological treatments (e.g. bupropion), as well as the negative affect caused by quitting attempts (e.g. depression, irritation, and nervousness). The identification of novel risk factors and their interactions (gene-gene and gene-environmental interactions) can help our overall understanding of the complex mechanism for nicotine dependence, and therefore, help identify individuals at highest risk for the nicotine addition and response to therapy on the basis of their personal exposure patterns and their genetic risk profiles. The gene-environmental interaction is often defined as joint participation in the causal mechanism leading to disease. But more complex interactions exist, such as genetic factors that have no impact on disease risk alone but become risk factors when combined with environmental factors or genetic factors that have an impact on disease by dual pathways, independently and through interaction with environmental factors. Therefore, it is crucial to identify the complex relationships among risk factors and their effects on smoking cessation.

Dr. Wang’s research proposes to develop new statistical approaches for modeling the risk of smoking cessation, which will identify the complex relationships among genetic variants, environmental risk factors (e.g., number of smokers in family and social context), and smoking cessation based on two rigorous statistical approaches: mediation analysis and Bayesian network recovery approaches. Specifically, she will identify the mediating/moderating effects of the negative affect due to quitting attempts and pharmacological treatments on the association between genetic variants and smoking cessation. The resulting statistical model will provide a novel tool for the development and tailoring of both prevention strategies for individuals at risk and effective pharmacologic interventions for current smokers and, therefore, contribute to the prevention of related cancers.

Larkin Strong, Ph.D.

"An ecological approach to cancer prevention: Reducing disparities in physical activity through research and action"

Physical inactivity represents one of the few modifiable risk factors for cancer. Regular physical activity is associated with a reduced risk of breast and colon cancers and has also been linked to reductions in prostate, lung, and endometrial cancer risk. Inactivity is also an important determinant of overweight and obesity, which are believed to contribute to 15-20% of all cancer deaths in the U.S. Given that physical activity behaviors established in youth may continue into adulthood, enhancing physical activity in youth has the potential to greatly reduce the cancer burden in the U.S through direct and indirect pathways. Furthermore, since physical activity tends to decline dramatically during adolescence, adolescence represents a critical age during which to identify the factors that contribute to or inhibit participation in physical activity. 

The focus of Dr. Strong’s research project is to delineate how factors at different levels influence adolescent physical activity (PA) behaviors in a group of 1,154 Mexican American adolescents in Houston, TX, drawn from the Duncan Family Institute’s Mexican American Cohort.  In this research project, Dr. Strong and colleagues seek to understand the independent contributions and interactions of multiple factors on physical activity:  adolescent characteristics & behaviors, parental characteristics and behaviors, neighborhood socioeconomic context and density of neighborhood PA resources; and identify potential targets for interventions to enhance physical activity in this population.   By drawing on unique data that includes parental and adolescent measures of  linguistic and behavioral acculturation and characteristics of adolescents’ neighborhood environments, findings from this research will have important implications for the design of family-based physical activity interventions for Mexican American families and will help to identify the importance of community physical activity resources to adolescent physical activity.  Furthermore, this research may identify segments of the population who may be more affected by local environmental features, helping policy makers and funders target public health investments to where they will have the greatest impact.

Francesco Versace, Ph.D.

“Putting smoking addiction in the affective context: Event-related potentials to emotional and neutral stimuli during a smoking cessation intervention” 

Tobacco use is associated with approximately 80 percent of all lung cancer deaths and increases the risk of many other types of cancer, including cancers of the throat, mouth, pancreas, kidney, bladder, and cervix (NCI, 2008).  Although the harmful effects of tobacco on human health have been known since the 1964 Surgeon General Report (Smoking and Health, 1964), approximately 20% of USA population continue to smoke (CDC, 2007).  In fact, most smokers identify tobacco use as harmful and express a desire to reduce or stop using it.  For example, annually nearly 35 million smokers express a desire to quit in national surveys.  Unfortunately, more than 85 % of those who actually try to quit on their own will relapse, often within the first week following the cessation attempt (NIDA, 2009).  The reasons underlying the maintenance of addiction are diverse, but most theoretical models attribute the difficulties in quitting to the smoker’s altered emotional processes.  Where theories differ is in the different emphasis that they attribute to specific emotional components to explain drug addiction and relapse.

The overarching theme of Dr. Versace’s research and the project described here is to investigate the role that emotional processes have in smoking addiction and relapse by taking advantage of the theoretical models, the experimental designs, and the measurement techniques developed within the field of affective neuroscience. Specifically, Dr. Versace and colleagues will evaluate attentional and emotional processes in the presence of cigarette-related and other intrinsically motivating cues using event-related brain potentials (ERP).  These ERP assessments will be carried out before and after a smoking cessation and will allow the evaluation of pharmacological smoking cessation aids (varenicline, bupropion and placebo) and their altering effects on emotional processes.