JANUARY 10, 2025
Amy Hughes Lansing, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychological Sciences
University of Vermont
About the Presentation: Young teens experimentation with substance use (SU) is a detectable early danger sign for substance use disorders (SUD) that is ideally responded to with an indicated prevention program that offers assessment and personalized support via ecological-behavioral family therapy. Despite increases in screening for SU in young teens, there remain substantial barriers to accessing these indicated prevention programs. A digital intervention may improve accessibility, but contemporary mHealth apps lack a model to offer personalized and continuous feedback for the family system on using evidence-based family practices in daily life. In this talk, Dr. Hughes Lansing will summarize recent and upcoming pilot studies used to co-produce with families, Parent and Teens Together (PATT), a dyadic digital parent-teen just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI) that will use a dyadic reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, an artificial intelligence (AI) technology to continually personalize JITAI decision rules based on the family context, to provide personalized and scalable support for use of evidence-based family practices in daily life.
About the Presenter:Dr. Hughes Lansing is a pediatric psychologist. Her primary research interest is in designing and testing programs, systems, and behavioral interventions that help kids, teens, and their families facing health challenges get access to high quality behavioral healthcare. Dr. Hughes Lansing’s research is interdisciplinary, collaborating with patients and families, healthcare teams in pediatric specialty care, and community systems to co-produce knowledge, programs, and behavioral interventions. In addition, her research incorporates intensive longitudinal modeling of dyadic and family processes involved in pediatric health behavior change and digital interventions to deliver accessible and personalized pediatric healthcare. Current projects focus on improving health outcomes in youth with type 1 diabetes and in youth with congenital heart disease as well as the prevention of substance use and other risk-behaviors in middle-schoolers.