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Bridging Connections in Addiction Research

Bridging Connections in Addiction Research (BCAR) Pilot Grants

BCAR is committed to promoting addiction research by providing pilot grant opportunities among faculty and trainees at the University of Pittsburgh to advance addiction research. BCAR will award funds for successful pilot projects that include Pitt addiction researchers working across disciplines to support the generation of pilot data to develop interdisciplinary proposals for NIH project funding. The spring 2022 review cycle is now open to pilot grant applications from Pitt faculty.
 

Vision

Our vision is to develop and nurture a multidisciplinary addiction research community at the University of Pittsburgh, where we can explore collaborative opportunities in research, funding, and trainee development.

Mission

The mission of Bridging Connections in Addiction Research (BCAR) is to promote addiction research by providing networking and collaborative opportunities among faculty and trainees at the University of Pittsburgh. BCAR advances collaboration through regular meetings, where attendees present current research and have opportunities for structured and unstructured networking.

Leadership

BCAR Networking and Scientific Retreat

On February 1, 2023, more than a hundred attendees joined the Bridging Connections in Addiction Research (BCAR) Networking and Scientific Retreat at the University Club. This year's event was sponsored by the Appalachian Node of the NIDA Clinical Trials network with additional support from the School of Pharmacy's Program Evaluation and Research Unit (PERU) and UPMC Health Plan. This event shined a spotlight on cutting edge addiction research across scientific disciplines and provided opportunities for researchers and trainees to expand their professional networks and knowledge in the study of addiction. Read a full recap of the event here.


 

Upcoming Events

Wednesday, May 10, 12-1 PM EST - https://pitt.zoom.us/j/92578596785
 
"Research at the Intersection of Substance Use and Sexual and Reproductive Health"
 
Dr. Natacha De Genna is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. She studies patterns of substance use and intersections with race, sex, gender, age, mental, and reproductive health. In additional to traditional quantitative research methods, Dr. De Genna's team is engaged in qualitative work that seeks to amplify the voices of younger pregnant people in the region.
 
Dr. Emily Dauria is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public Health. Her research applies mixed-methods to examine substance use, sexual and reproductive health, and violence among individuals surveilled or impacted by teh carceral system.
 
If you know of other local, addiction-related seminars or events to share with the broader Pitt community, please contact Jason Colditz (colditzjb@pitt.edu).
 

Previous Events

Wednesday, April 12, 12-1 PM EST

"A Multi-Pronged Approach to Predict Drug Interactions and Optimize Drug Dosing in Pregnancy, an Understudied Population"

Nupur Chaphekar is a graduate student in teh Venkat lab. She received her BS in Pharmacy from the Institute of Chemical Technology and her MS in Pharmacy from the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently working on her dissertation that addresses the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of substance use disorder treatment in pregnant women.

Dr. Raman Venkataramanan (Venkat) is the Director of the Therapeutic Drug Monitoring Lab at UPMC and the Clinical Pharmacokinetics Lab at the University of Pittsburgh and Co-Director of the Toxicology Lab at UPMC. Venkat's lab focuses on optimizing drug dosing with a thorough understanding of the Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics of drugs in Pregnancy, Transplantation, and Cancer. His current research focuses on Buprenorphine dosing in Pregnancy based on in vitro, preclinical, clinical, and computational approaches.

Wednesday, March 8, 12-1 PM EST

"Identifying Sensory Processing Mechanisms that Underly Pain and its Clinical Variability"

Dr. Benedict Alter is a physician-scientist practicing pain medicine and studying pain modulation in an effort to improve pain management. He is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Translational Pain Research in the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. Research projects focus on the role of endogenous pain modulation in chronic pain and identifying ways to leverage pain dampening systems for novel pain therapies and biomarkers.

Dr. Sarah Ross's lab is interested in characterizing spinal microcircuits that process somatosensory information - touch, temperature, pain, and itch. Dr. Ross's research team uses a combination of approaches to dissect these neural circuits in mice: generate novel genetic tools to study populations of spinal neurons, perform axon circuit mapping using viruses, elucidate neural coding using optogenetics and electrophysiology, and study sensory behavior using chemogenetic approaches.
 

Wednesday, February 8, 12-1 PM EST

"Simulation Models of Opioid Use Disorder and Overdose"

Dr. Mark Roberts is the director of the University of Pittsburgh's Public Health Dynamics Laboratory and is a Distinguished Professor in Health Policy and Management at Pitt's School of Public Health. Dr. Roberts is a medical decision scientist with substantial experience in simulation, cost effectiveness, and the application of simulation and optimization methods to problems in health and medicine.

Dr. Michaela Rikard is a postdoctoral fellow in the Public Health Analytics and Modeling Fellowship in the Division of Overdose Prevention at the CDC. She received her PhD in Biomedical Enginerring at the University of Virginia and has expertise in developing and using simulation models of chronic diseases to understand their progression and design interventions.

Wednesday, January 11, 12-1 PM EST

"Translational Approaches for the Treatment of Substance Use Disorders"

Dr. Khaled Moussawi, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Pittsburgh. Khaled joined the University of Pittsburgh two years ago from the intramural research program at NIDA, where he completed a clinical and post-doctoral fellowship. His research program involves pre-clinical and clinical studies focused on understanding relapse vulnerability and the use of neuromodulation techniques to treat substance use disorders.

Wednesday, December 14, 12-1 PM EST

"Advancing Addiction Treatment Services Grounded in Harm Reduction"

Raagini Jawa, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor and Clinician Investigator in the Department of General Internal Medicine at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a clinician investigator in the Center for Research on Health Care. She is board certified in Internal Medicine, Infectious Disease, and Addiction Medicine. Dr. Jawa’s research interests focus on the intersection of Infectious Disease and Addiction, including studying how to optimize integration of harm reduction services for individuals with substance use disorders within traditional health settings, developing multidisciplinary provider facing interventions to prevent infectious, and non-infection complications of drug use. Clinically, she provides office-based addiction treatment in the IM Recovery Engagement Program and is a consultant on the Endovascular Infection Service at UPMC. 

Paul Joudrey, MD, MPH, MHS, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Certified as a General Internist and Addiction Medicine specialist, Dr. Joudrey provides primary care, addiction medicine, and harm reduction services within outpatient and community settings. His research focuses on identifying factors impacting addiction treatment access and outcomes across urban and rural communities and developing, evaluating, and scaling interventions tailored to community needs to improve the health of people who use drugs. This includes research to expand access to patient centered methadone treatment for opioid addiction. He received his undergraduate degree from Case Western Reserve University and his medical degree from New York University. Dr. Joudrey completed residency training at Montefiore Medical Center in the Primary Care Social Internal Medicine program and completed the National Clinician Scholars Program fellowship at Yale School of Medicine. He was a Yale Program in Addiction Medicine faculty member prior to coming to the University of Pittsburgh.

Wednesday, November 9, 12-1 pm EST 

"Addictive Behaviors in the Perinatal Period: Eating- and Pain-Related Issues"

Dr. Michele D. Levine, a licensed clinical psychologist, is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Services at the University of Pittsburgh. She has expertise in studying weight, eating, and appetitive behaviors during pregnancy and the postpartum period. She has been funded by the NIH in the US since 2002 to study perinatal health. 

Dr. Grace Lim's clinical practice and research work are dedicated to improving pain management and post-birth recovery by identifying safe and effective therapies. She has extensive formal and practical experience with clinical trials, prospective longitudinal cohort studies, observational research using administrative data sets, and patient-reported outcomes, pain measurement, psychological and physiological dimensions of pain and analgesia, and observational methods. Dr. Lim's publications in high-impact journals cover topics including labor pain in vulnerable populations, depression, and perioperative and anesthesia-related outcomes.

Wednesday, October 12, 12-1 PM EST

"Acute Nicotine Reinforcement Requires Ability to Discriminate the Stimulus Effects of Nicotine"

Kenneth A. Perkins, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry, has been on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh since 1986, funded by the NIH since then to conduct research focused largely on two broad "themes." One theme emphasizes translational studies drawing on preclinical findings to examine acute effects of nicotine (and cigarette smoking) that may explain the persistence of tobacco dependence in humans. A clear example is research over the past 30 years on the discriminative stimulus and reinforcing effects of acute nicotine. The second theme is improving clinical treatment for smoking cessation. 

Wednesday, September 14th, 12-1 pm EST

"Challenges of Conducting Clinical Addiction Research: Making Lemonade Out of Lemons"

Jane Liebschutz, MD, MPH, FACP, is Professor of Medicine with Tenure, Falk Chair in Ambulatory Medicine, Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine, and Director of the Center for Research on Health Care at the University of Pittsburgh. As MPI of the Appalachian Node of NIDA's Clinical Trials Network (CTN), Dr. Liebschutz is spearheading national research trials that include interventions for patients with subclinical Opioid Use Disorder (OUD), a project managing pain and opioids in patients on hemodialysis, and the "Retention, Duration, and Discontinuation" (RDD) study examining initiation and duration of treatment for OUD. Through her work as a physician, Dr. Liebschutz has supported her patients' pursuits of sobriety and recovery in general practice as well as through the UPMC Internal Medicine Recovery Engagement Program (IM-REP).
 

Friday, March 18th, 12-1 pm EST

"Developing and Implementing Opioid Overdose Risk Prediction Tools"

Walid Gellad, MD, MPH - Dr. Gellad's research focuses on physician prescribing practices and on policy issues affecting access and adherence to medications. He was the recipient of a career development award from the Department of Veterans Affairs and is now the principal investigator on grants from the VA, NIH, State of Pennsylvania, and private foundations for multiple studies of pharmaceutical policy and prescription use. With an R01 from NIDA, a grant partnership with the PA Department of Health, and a grant from the RK Mellon Foundation, he currently leads multiple research teams developing machine learning models predicting opioid related adverse events using healthcare and social services data sets. He has authored more than 180 research articles, editorials, and commentaries in leading medical and policy journals, and he is a regular commentator on pharmaceutical policy issues in major news outlets. Since 2015, Dr. Gellad has directed Pitt’s Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing, an interdisciplinary collaborative of researchers dedicated to improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of medication use and equity of medication access.
 

Friday, February 18th, 12-1 pm EST

"Novel Approaches for Identifying Biological Predictors of Alcohol-Related Health Outcomes"

Panagiotis (Takis) Benos, PhD - Dr. Benos is a Professor and the Vice Chair for Academic Affairs in the Department of Computational and Systems Biology. Dr. Benos’s research focuses on causal modeling of biomedical and clinical data, integration of multi-modal data using machine learning, clinical genomics, modeling transcriptional and post-transcriptional gene regulation, and modeling of gene disease networks. The Benos lab develops machine learning methods to integrate heterogeneous data into a single probabilistic graphical framework. The resulting graphs can then be used to infer causal interactions, uncover disease mechanisms, select biomarkers or help stratify patient populations.

Gavin Arteel, PhD, FAASLD - Dr. Arteel is a Professor of Medicine and the Associate Chief for Basic Science in the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition. Dr. Arteel is the Pilot and Feasibility Core Director for the Pittsburgh Liver Research Center and his research focuses on the interaction between hepatotoxicants (e.g., arsenic) and lifestyle choices (e.g., obesity and alcohol) in the initiation and progression of chronic liver diseases. His current research foci are based on the understanding that transitional changes to the ECM proteome (i.e., “matrisome”) play an underappreciated role in the initiation and progression of liver disease. He is developing computational tools to attempt to predict mechanism(s) and to develop biomarkers (or surrogate biomarkers) for use in the clinics.

 

Friday, January 21st, 12-1 pm EST

"Improving Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder in Pregnancy"

Marian Jarlenski, PhD, MPH - Dr. Jarlenski is the Vice Chair for Practice and Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management in the Graduate School of Public Health. Dr. Jarlenski serves as Associate Director of the Center for Women's Health Research and Innovation, and is PI on two R01s focusing on (1) using real-world data to understand access to and quality of OUD treatment and pregnancy outcomes and (2) an implementation-effectiveness trial of a provider-level intervention to improve OUD treatment in pregnancy and subsequent outcomes. Dr. Jarlenski also provides research support for the Pennsylvania Medicaid program, where she currently co-leads a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded project to study interventions to advance racial equity in pregnancy and birth outcomes.


Elizabeth Krans, MD, MSc - Dr. Krans is an Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences and is board certified in Obstetrics and Gynecology and Addiction Medicine. She is Director of Perinatal Addiction Medicine at Magee-Women’s Hospital where she provides comprehensive substance use treatment services for women with substance use disorders. She also leads a NIH-funded research program focused on improving health care delivery for women with substance use disorders and their children. 

 

Friday, October 15, 2021, 12-1 pm EST

 "Challenges in Managing and Preventing Pain (CHAMPP) Clinical Research Center"

Hailey Bulls, PhD – Dr. Bulls is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, clinical psychologist, and the Associate Director of the CHAllenges in Managing and Preventing Pain (CHAMPP) Clinical Research Center at Pitt. Broadly, her research focuses on improving pain management and quality of life in patients with cancer and survivors, with an emphasis on mitigating the impact of opioid stigma and promoting safe, effective medication use.

Charles Jonassaint, PhD, MHS – Dr. Jonassaint is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, Social Work, and Clinical and Translational Science and a clinical psychologist. His research focuses on implementation of behavioral intervention technologies (e.g., mHealth apps for stress and pain management) in low-resource settings and underserved populations.

 

Friday, September 17, 2021, 12-1 pm EST

 "Cross-Generational Transmission of Risk for Alcohol and Other Substance Use Disorders"

Shirley Hill, PhD – Dr. Hill is Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology and Human Genetics and serves on the BCAR Steering Committee. Her research has been dedicated to understanding the neural and genetic underpinnings of addiction across the lifespan. She developed the first family study of densely affected families that now spans data collection on three generations with plans for extension into a fourth generation. The research program has provided numerous insights into the characteristics of individuals with high risk for developing addiction due to familial loading for alcohol use disorder (AUD).

 

Friday, May 21, 2021, 12-1 pm EST

Alexander Star, PhD – Dr. Star is a Professor of Chemistry, Bioengineering, and Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh. The primary focus of his Sensor Technology Advanced Research (STAR) laboratory is the development of chemical sensing applications of carbon nanomaterials.

Jessica Merlin, MD, PhD, MBA – Dr. Merlin is an Associate Professor of Medicine and the Director of the CHAllenges in Managing and Preventing Pain (CHAMPP) Clinical Research Center at Pitt. Her research includes work to understand the relationship between cannabis use and opioid prescribing in individuals with HIV, and front-line cannabis dispensary staff attitudes and practices.

 

Friday, April 16, 2021, 12-1 pm EST

"Examination of Acute Alcohol Effects"

Sarah Pedersen, PhD – Dr. Pedersen is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology and co-director of the Youth and Family Research Program. A primary aim of her research focuses on integrating individual and environmental factors to understand health inequities in alcohol problems.

Michael Sayette, PhD – Dr. Sayette is Director of the Alcohol and Smoking Research Laboratory and Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry. His alcohol research focuses on the effects of alcohol on cognitive, emotional, and social processes in social drinkers.

 

Friday, March 19, 2021, 12-1 PM EST

"Nicotine Exposure and Reinforcement in Adolescence: Understanding Behaviors in Rates and Humans"

Alan Sved, PhD - Dr. Sved is a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience, having served as Chair of the department and co-director of the Center for Neuroscience until stepping down from this position this past year. His research program has focused on two separate areas, the neurobiology of the reinforcing properties of nicotine and on the central neural control of the autonomic nervous system, primarily as it relates to the cardiovascular system.

Jaime Sidani, PhD, CHES - Dr. Sidani is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, a Core Faculty member of the Center for Research on Behavioral Health, Media, and Technology, and an Affiliate Scholar at PittCyber. Her research centers on the intersection of media and health, with a specific focus on emerging tobacco products. Dr. Sidani is currently a K12 Scholar in PittCATS as well as an American Heart Association Career Development Awardee.

 

Friday, January 29, 2021, 12-1 PM EST

"Improving Cue Exposure Therapy for Addiction: New Human and Animal Methods to Examine and Attenuate Drug-Cue Conditioning"

Cynthia Conklin, PhD - Dr. Conklin is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry whose research focuses on underlying mechanisms of drug conditioning and development of novel methods to reduce cue reactivity and relapse in smokers.

Mary Torregrossa, PhD  - Dr. Torregrossa is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and her research focuses on how learning and memory mechanisms contribute to substance use disorders and how adolescent age and sex influence risk. She is also a lead investigator within the NIDA-funded (P50) Center for Adolescent Reward, Rhythms and Sleep (CARRS).

 

February 27, 2020

On Thursday, February 27, 2020, Bridging Connections in Addiction Research was held at the University of Pittsburgh to connect addiction researchers. Above, 17 presenters participated in the Data Blitz, during which they had just 3 minutes to present 3 slides.

The afternoon began with Dr. Jane Liebschutz, Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine at Pitt, introducing the NIDA Clinical Trials Network.

Our keynote speaker was Dr. Roger Weiss: Chief of Substance Use Disorders Division of McLean Hospital, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the PI of the New England Consortium of NIDA CTN. He presented "Evolution of the Field and Lessons Learned Over 40 Years of Substance Use Disorder Research."

We were so pleased to be present in this room full of addiction researchers—making connections, forming community, beginning collaborations. Thanks to all attendees for spending the time to get to know one another and bridge connections!

For more information on this gathering, check out all of the social media coverage of the event: #PittAddiction.