Meet our Program Faculty

Alexandria Bauer, PhD

Assistant Professor of Applied Psychology
Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology

Dr. Bauer leads the REACH Alliance research lab, comprising a diverse group of researchers, students, community members, mental health service providers, and individuals with lived experiences who are dedicated to understanding and addressing mental health inequities, particularly for racial and ethnic minoritized populations using community-based participatory research strategies.

Sarah Brislin, PhD

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Dr. Brislin’s research focuses on determining biological mechanisms that contribute to the expression and development of externalizing behavior in adolescence. She is particularly interested in understanding the biological, environmental, and developmental influences on the emergence, persistence, and desistance of antisocial behavior and substance use in adolescence and early adulthood. Towards this end, she incorporates a broad range of methods to better understand this phenotypic expression. She is also trained as a clinical psychologist and is interested in translating these mechanistic findings into clinically relevant measures or interventions for at-risk youth.

Jennifer Buckman, PhD

Professor of Kinesiology and Physiology
School of Arts & Sciences – New Brunswick

Dr. Buckman directs the Cardiovascular Stress Reactivity Lab which focuses on how recreational alcohol and cannabis use taxes human physiological systems and undermines health. By considering substance use as a physiological stressor, the lab likens it to poor diet, insufficient sleep, and sedentary behavior, all of which force bodily systems away from their homeostatic set points in dose-dependent ways. Ongoing studies use cardiovascular psychophysiology to measure how unhealthy behaviors ‘pile up’ to stress our heart and vessels.

Tammy Chung, PhD

Professor of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Director, Center for Population Behavioral Health

Dr. Chung’s research focuses on adolescent and young adult substance use: assessment and diagnosis, clinical course, prevention and early intervention. Ongoing research projects use digital health methods (e.g., data collected using smartphone, wearable device like Fitibit) to understand how “in the moment” feelings and behaviors captured by daily phone surveys and wearables (e.g., activity level, sleep) can be used to predict and better manage mental and physical health.

Angelo DiBello, PhD

Associate Professor of Applied Psychology
Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology

Dr. DiBello’s Social Health, Addiction & Relationship Processes (SHARP) Lab is an applied social-psychology research lab dedicated to studying questions at the intersection of social and clinical psychology. The lab, guided by social psychological theory, pursues questions concerning health and addictive behaviors. Specifically, it focuses on key behavioral outcomes of alcohol use, drug abuse, and sexual health.

Danielle Dick, PhD

Professor of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Director, Rutgers Addiction Research Center

Dr. Dick directs the Translational Psychiatric Genomics (TPG) Lab which researches how genetic and environmental influences contribute to the development of patterns of substance use and related behaviors, such as childhood conduct problems and depression, and how we can use that information to inform prevention and intervention. Lab members are involved in a wide variety of research projects including gene identification efforts, twins studies, longitudinal studies, and randomized controlled trials.

Samantha Farris, PhD

Associate Professor of Psychology
School of Arts & Sciences – New Brunswick

Dr. Farris directs the Rutgers Emotion, Health, and Behavior (REHAB) Laboratory which conducts experimental and treatment research in clinical and health psychology from a “Mind-Body” perspective. Broadly, her research aims to understand why and how certain psychological symptoms and conditions, like anxiety and stress, influence health risk behaviors and chronic disease. The lab aims to improve the physical and psychological well-being of our community and to educate trainees to be well-rounded clinical scientists and practitioners in clinical health psychology.

Denise Hien, PhD, ABPP

Helen E. Chaney Distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology
Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology
Director, Center of Alcohol and Substance Use Studies

Dr. Hien is an internationally-recognized leader in the field of racial/ethnic minoritized women’s health disparities and the treatment of trauma-related psychiatric disorders and their comorbidity. Her Trauma and Addiction Project (TAP) Lab integrates cognitive, interpersonal, and neurodevelopmental perspectives on traumatic stress and addiction over the lifespan and examines the impact of social determinants such as race, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic status on treatment process and outcome using data science as a means to advance equity. 

Kristina Jackson, PhD

Professor of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Associate Director, Rutgers Addiction Research Center 

Dr. Jackson’s research largely centers on the etiology and course of substance use among adolescents and young adults. She is currently funded by NIAAA and NIDA to examine individual- and contextual-level risk factors for substance use initiation and progression to increasingly severe use, including in vulnerable populations and youth with mental health comorbidities. Her work also involves understanding the sources of messaging surrounding cannabis and people’s motives for using cannabis and the context of their use. She has conducted work on the remission of substance use disorders in college students and across young adulthood, and employs fine-grained approaches to study co-use of alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis.

Anna Konova, PhD

Associate Professor of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Co-Director, Rutgers-Princeton Center for Cognitive Computational Neuropsychiatry

Dr. Konova oversees the Addiction & Decision Neuroscience Lab which uses brain imaging, computational modeling, and dense longitudinal phenotyping methods to understand how people make decisions, how decision-making is shaped by our motivational states and context, and the mechanisms that drive addictive behavior at the person level. Ongoing studies focus on these questions in the specific context of opioid and alcohol use disorders. Dr. Konova also co-directs the Rutgers-Princeton Center for Cognitive Computational Neuro-Psychiatry, a center dedicated to applying similar methods transdiagnostically, across substance use and other psychiatric disorders.

Lia Nower, JD, PhD

Associate Dean for Research & Distinguished Professor
School of Social Work
Director, Center for Gambling Studies

Dr. Nower is a leading researcher in the area of problem gambling, including its etiology, prevalence, and incidence. Her work also includes designing effective screening tools and treatments to address problem gambling, as well as conducting analyses of big-data from online gambling and sports wagering environments to identifying trends with implications for harm reduction and responsible gambling. A key component of her work is to drive public policy innovations. The Center for Gambling Studies has a range of ongoing projects, from GIS mapping and informatics to AI/Machine learning models and big data analysis, to developing and testing clinical tools, to reducing gambling-related harm among college athletics.

Marilyn Piccirillo, PhD

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Dr. Piccirillo’s research explores how digital technology tools can be used to improve assessment and treatment for substance use problems and co-occurring mental health distress. Ongoing projects include 1) a randomized clinical trial examining a data-driven approach to counseling for co-occurring anxiety, traumatic stress, and problematic drinking, 2) an observational study examining daily processes that facilitate treatment and recovery in a residential treatment center, and 3) meta-science projects examining the utility of experience sampling methods for clinical research and practice.

Jill Rabinowitz, PhD

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Dr. Rabinowitz’s program of research spans the substance use continuum and ranges from preventing substance use initiation to improving treatment engagement, retention, and care of individuals in recovery from substance use disorders. Her research also has focused on understanding the individual and joint contributions of social determinants and individual characteristics (e.g., behavioral phenotypes, genetic predispositions) that may influence the developmental course of substance use, particularly among diverse populations (e.g., African American and Latino youth).

Jessica Salvatore, PhD

Associate Professor of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Dr. Salvatore directs the Genes, Environments, and Neurodevelopment in Addictions (GENA) program whose mission is to understand how genetic and environmental factors contribute to the onset, persistence, and remission of alcohol and other substance use disorders. Her primary area of focus is on how alcohol and other substance use affects and is affected by close relationships with parents, peers, and romantic partners across the lifespan. She takes a genetically informed perspective in her work, with a particular interest in understanding the social/environmental mechanisms through which genetic risk for alcohol use disorder and related problems are transmitted in families, as well as gene-environment interplay that may render some individuals more susceptible to social/environmental risks.

Carolyn Sartor, PhD

Associate Professor of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Dr. Sartor’s program of research is aimed at refining etiological models of risky alcohol, cannabis, and nicotine use in the adolescent to young adult years to reflect variations within and across race/ethnicity and gender. Her work integrates developmental and health disparities perspectives to identify socioenvironmental and familial influences on progression through stages of substance use (e.g., initiation, problem use). The roles of trauma exposure, neighborhood conditions, religious involvement, discrimination, and parenting as well as genetic liability to substance use disorders figure prominently in her work.

Fazil Aliev, PhD

Associate Professor of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Dr. Aliev is a member of the Translational Psychiatric Genomics laboratory led by Danielle Dick. His background is in mathematical statistics, and his current research is mainly concentrated on large-scale genetic studies of alcohol use disorders and related outcomes. He plays a leadership role in genetic analyses including methodological studies, data cleaning, data imputation and statistical genetic analyses for multiple nationwide and worldwide genetic projects.

Sally Kuo, PhD

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Dr. Kuo is a member of the Genes, Environment, and Neurodevelopment in Addictions (GENA) program within the Center for Psychiatric Health and Genomics. Her background is in developmental psychology and psychiatric genetics. Her research focuses on how risk and protective factors across multiple levels (e.g., biological/genes, environments) accumulate across the lifespan to influence substance use, emotional health, and social functioning in adolescence and adulthood.

Michele Pato, MD

Professor of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Director, Center for Psychiatric Health and Genomics 

Dr. Pato has co-led extensive population genetic studies in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder for over 30 years, including the Genomic Psychiatry Cohort (GPC) and the Portuguese Island Collection Studies.  The GPC has enrolled nearly 65,000 participants, including people suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, OCD, and 25,000 control participants.  Dr. Pato has an extensive background in research of psychiatric disorders, both in terms of genetics and clinically. Her  publications are not just in the research science of medicine but often on how to teach and train people (medical students, residents and faculty) at all levels of training to do research.

Margaret Swarbrick, PhD

Research Professor of Applied Psychology
Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology
Associate Director, Center of Alcohol and Substance Use Studies 

Dr. Swarbrick has made significant contributions to the body of literature in occupational therapy, nursing, and community behavioral health care practice. She developed a strength based 8-dimensional wellness model to promote recovery from mental health and substance use. Dr Swarbrick is known for bringing the voices and needs of people to the table by collaborating with the peer community and family groups to identify and address social determinants that are barriers to recovery and wellness. She has created self-care wellness programs for people in recovery, caregiver’s, families, youth, and professionals. 

Jill Williams, MD

Professor of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Director, Division of Addiction Psychiatry 

Dr. Williams’ work focuses on helping to address tobacco and other addictions in individuals with mental illness. This has included clinical trials as well as policy and systems interventions aimed at the behavioral health treatment system with an emphasis on educating behavioral health professionals in best practices in treating substance use disorders.