UW Associate Professor Receives Grant for Drug Misuse Intervention

University of Wyoming Associate Professor Alison Looby, in the Department of Psychology, has been awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded grant to design and implement an effort to reduce the misuse and diversion of prescription stimulant medication among college students.

Looby partnered with a colleague at California State University-Long Beach, Niloofar Bavarian, for the three-year, $142,520 grant titled “Screening and Brief Intervention for Prescription Stimulant Misuse and Diversion: Refining and Piloting a Curriculum for College Health Providers.” The award comes from NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Looby is a substance-use researcher, and her work focuses on prescription stimulant misuse, alcohol and cannabis. She also is a clinical psychologist, and her research aims to identify cognitive and behavioral mechanisms that underlie substance use -- and attempts to modify those mechanisms through intervention.

The grant is designed to assist researchers in developing, implementing and testing new interventions.

Looby and her colleagues have been working to develop a screening and brief intervention program to be implemented at college student health services. The intervention would be used as a brief screener for students coming in for general wellness visits.

“The overall goal is to prevent and reduce the misuse and diversion of prescription stimulants among college students on a large scale in a time- and cost-effective manner,” Looby says.

Looby earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of California-San Diego in 2002. She then earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University at Albany-State University of New York in 2011. She joined the UW faculty in 2016.

For more information about this grant, email Looby at alooby@uwyo.edu.