OCTOBER 23, 2026
Johannes Thrul, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Mental Health
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
About the Presentation: This talk will present an overview of the Cannabis & Health Research Initiative (CHRI) at Johns Hopkins, a NIDA-UM1-funded program aimed at advancing the scientific understanding of medicinal cannabis use and its health effects. The presentation will describe key components of the initiative, including the National Cannabis Study, which follows a cohort of adults newly initiating medicinal cannabis, the development of standardized assessment tools such as the Cannabis Use Questionnaire, and efforts to utilize natural language processing to identify medicinal cannabis use in electronic health records. It will also highlight sub-projects to conduct cannabis product surveillance testing, and the creation of a national data repository and research library to support broader academic research on therapeutic cannabis.
About the Presenter: Johannes Thrul, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and has a joint appointment at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. He received his PhD in Psychology from the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and completed postdoctoral training at UCSF. His research focuses on substance use and addiction, as well as digital and mobile health research, including the use of smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment and just-in-time interventions. He leads multiple NIH-funded studies and co-directs a national longitudinal research registry to examine the health effects of medicinal cannabis. He has received numerous teaching awards at Johns Hopkins and serves in editorial and scientific advisory roles across the addiction and digital health fields.