May 9, 2013
Lynn Fiellin, MD
Associate Professor of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine
About the Presentation: Dr. Fiellin’s talk describes the process of assembling a highly multi-disciplinary team including behavioral scientists, experts in HIV, experts in child/adolescent health, serious game designers, and commercial game developers to design, develop, and test an interactive videogame intervention. PlayForward: Elm City Stories was developed for the iPad and is currently being evaluated in a randomized controlled trial engaging 330 teens aged 11-14 years from New Haven area after-school programs.
About the Presenter: Lynn E. Fiellin, MD is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Section of General Internal Medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine. Her research is focused in the area of HIV and substance abuse prevention and treatment. She has received funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Health Resources and Services Administration, NIDA, and NIAAA for her work. Most recently, she has been awarded a five-year grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to develop and test an interactive video game for the purpose of risk reduction and HIV prevention in at-risk young teens. With this project she created Play2Prevent™, a new initiative aimed at forging collaborations and partnerships between scientists, educators, videogame designers/developers, community based organizations and others with the goal being to develop innovative targeted interventions and educational materials for risk reduction and prevention in youth and young adults.