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Administrator’s role offers challenge
Lorraine Collins’ experience as a researcher at the Research Institute on Addictions made her the ideal choice to become associate dean for research in the School of Public Health and Health Professions. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE
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“We need to work with the community to demand better public health at the policy levels.”
A psychologist who has studied health behaviors at UB’s Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) for 22 years, R. Lorraine Collins made an ideal candidate for associate dean for research at the School of Public Health and Health Professions (SPHHP).
Since she made the move up Main Street to the South Campus a year ago, Collins has continued her work at the institute while absorbing the culture of the school; she looks forward to helping it become a nationally recognized center for public health investigation.
“The transition has gone very well for me,” Collins says. She was looking for a new challenge and feels fortunate to have found it at SPHHP. She’s also happy to stay in Buffalo because she enjoys the area and did not have to uproot her husband and daughter from a job and school.
Among Collins’ top priorities is to grow the research portfolio and increase SPHHP’s national visibility. Doing so, she says, will help the school fulfill its strategic and academic mission, despite the tight fiscal climate.
“We want to keep moving forward with attracting the best faculty and students, with multidisciplinary projects, and with creating more opportunities to work with new partners here at UB and in the community,” she says. “I think it’s good to stay flexible, especially right now.”
Another goal is to help link SPHHP’s research with practical public health programs in the local community. Although Collins feels the school has done a great job at spreading the public health message locally, “we can always do more—there is always more need.” Buffalo suffers from high rates of chronic disease and environmental hazards that require deeper connections between UB and the community partners and lawmakers who can make scientific solutions come to life.
“We need to work with the community to demand better public health at the policy levels,” she says, citing the recent bottled water tax, which overlooks the opportunity to tax sugar-laden soft drinks. “We can and do intervene at the individual level, which is what I’m trained to do as a psychologist, but we must also contribute to advancing policies and laws that protect public health. The school can help train policy-makers to better understand and improve these regulations.”
SPHHP’s newest dean is still an active investigator. Collins keeps close ties to RIA with several active, federally funded projects. Through collaborations there—and now at SPHHP—she continues her research on drinking restraint, malt liquor and marijuana use, psychosocial factors in substance use and women’s issues. She also is a co-investigator, along with RIA research scientist Christopher Barrick (principal investigator), on a study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse on knowledge exchange and skills training for therapists.
Her particular focus is on alcohol use and abuse in emerging young adults, aged 18 to 25. “Alcohol abuse is a huge public health problem,” she says.
In May, Collins received a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to study the concurrent use of malt liquor—an inexpensive, high-alcohol beverage—and marijuana.
A lot of people who drink malt liquor also use marijuana, Collins says. Similar to much of her past RIA work, the two-year study will consider the context of this substance abuse by using a novel method involving cell phones. The 80 study participants will use a cell phone and an automated voice-response system that they call every time they use either alcohol or marijuana, resulting in more accurate data and providing a systematic look at the situations in which one or both substances are used.
The study also includes random sampling of participants’ ongoing lives to provide a broader context for understanding their substance use. “Context through random sampling is a very important way of understanding raw data properly because we can better understand behavior when given the background of when, where and why the person is using or not using a substance,” Collins says.
She has been a pioneer in using cell phones to do random sampling. Research suggests that study participants are more comfortable, and thus more compliant, with the computerized system than when speaking to a live person.
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