Principal Investigator & Professor/ Department of Health Education & Behavior/ College Health & Human Performance.
A clinical psychologist with public health expertise, Dr. Tucker has over 35 years of extramurally funded research guided by behavioral economics on harmful substance use and related risk behaviors, including HIV/AIDS, using community and treatment populations, with awards from NIAAA, NIDA, CDC, and SAMSHA/CSAT. Recent projects aim to inform risk reduction strategies with disadvantaged emerging adults and problem drinkers attempting natural recovery without treatment. Dr. Tucker has contributed to 4 books, including Dynamic Pathways to Recovery from Alcohol Use Disorder: Meaning and Methods (Tucker & Witkiewitz, 2022; https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108976213), and over 135 journal articles and book chapters. Notable recognitions include the 2015 Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Clinical Psychology award from Division 12 (APA Society of Clinical Psychology) and the 2018 Betty Ford award from the Association for Medical Education and Research on Substance Abuse.
email: jaliet@ufl.edu Tel: (352)-294-1812
Research Coordinator/ Department of Health Education & Behavior/ College of Health & Human Performance.
Manju Karki, a native of Nepal, holds an MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has been working at the University of Florida for over a decade in different departments managing different health research projects. Prior to working at UF, Manju worked on a wide array of public health projects in settings including academic institutions, non-profit organizations, and United Nation Organizations in different countries. Manju’s past research experiences have been in substance use, harm reduction, HIV/AIDS, women’s health, and Florida Medicaid. Manju is passionate about community health projects. Her primary role is to lead and manage the NIAAA research project Digital Motivational Behavioral Economic Intervention to Reduce Risky Drinking Among Community-Dwelling Emerging Adults and provide support for the Center for Behavioral Economic Health Research (CBEHR) activities.
email: karkim@ufl.edu Tel: (352-294-1068)
Associate Researcher/ Department of Health Education & Behavior/ College of Health & Human Performance.
Dr. Lesleigh Stinson’s research interests lie in alcohol misuse, excessive social media use, and behavioral economic-informed analyses and treatment methods. Trained as a behavior analyst, she is also interested in quantitative models of choice behavior. Dr. Stinson’s recent dissertation involving a novel application of contingency management to reduce excessive social media use received several awards, including the BF Skinner Student Research Award. As a Post-doctoral Associate with the CBEHR, she is currently working on research that is focused on behavioral economic treatments for and analyses of alcohol misuse.
email: lcraddock@ufl.edu Tel: (352)-294-1617
Research Assistant/ Department of Health Education & Behavior/ College of Health & Human Performance.
Elora Duong recently received her B.S. degree in Psychology with an emphasis in Behavior Analysis from UF and has since been working in various UF research laboratories and programs such as the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Lab, the Edge Lab, and the Addictive Behaviors and Health Studies Group. Her future interests include using behavioral analytic and economic theories to improve cognitive-behavioral therapy practices and to evaluate the environmental contingencies of authoritative positions within businesses and political systems.
email: eduong@ufl.edu Tel: (352)-294-6776
Co-Investigator/ Assistant Professor/ Department of Health Education & Behavior/ College of Health & Human Performance.
Dr. Yurasek’s background and training is in Clinical Psychology with an emphasis on substance use and health behaviors. Her primary interests include using behavioral economic theory to identify risk factors for substance misuse and poor response to treatment and adapting and evaluating brief interventions. Current grant-funded projects include a 1) K23 Training Award (NIDA) to adapt a behavioral economic intervention for truant youth who use marijuana, and 2) an Early Career Psychologist Research Award (APA Division 50, Addiction Psychology) to guide treatment development for youth. She is also a Co-Investigator on an NIAAA R01 (PI: Tucker) evaluating a brief web-based behavioral economic intervention to reduce risky drinking in an emerging adult population. Dr. Yurasek leads the Behavioral Economic Approaches to Changing Health behaviors (BEACH) Research Group and is Scientific Co-Director of the CBEHR.
email: a.yurasek@ufl.edu Tel: (352)-294-1814
Co-Investigator/ Associate Professor/ Department of Health Education & Behavior/ College of Health & Human Performance.
Dr. Cheong is a quantitative social psychologist at the University of Florida. Before joining the University of Florida, she held academic positions at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), University of Pittsburgh, and State University of New York (SUNY) – Albany. As an expert on mediation analysis and longitudinal modeling, she has published multiple peer-reviewed journal articles and handbook chapters on methods for testing mediation, with a focus on longitudinal mediation. With expertise in content areas of substance use, HIV related risk behaviors, and community- and school-based intervention/prevention, she has led analysis teams and coordinated the collaborative work of multiple substantive researchers and biostatisticians/methodologists. Her leadership role at previous institutions includes serving as the primary methodologist for the Core Research Project of the CDC-funded Prevention Research Center and the UAB Center for the Study of Community Health, and as the liaison between two research cores in the UAB Center for AIDS Research, the Behavioral and Community Science Core and the Biostatistics and Analysis Core.
email: jwcheong@ufl.edu Tel:(352)-294-1811
Co-Investigator/ Clinical Research Manager/ Department of Health Education & Behavior/ College of Health & Human Performance.
Susan Chandler joined the Department of Health Education & Behavior in 2014 and served as Clinical Research Manager in the Center for Behavioral Economic Health Research. She was previously research program manager at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health. She holds a Master of Public Health degree from UAB and a Master of Arts degree in English from Mississippi State University. Her research experience includes behavioral economic studies of substance misuse and risky sexual behaviors and the intersection thereof, as well as natural recovery and environmental contexts of substance use and misuse. She is experienced with interactive voice response and online data collection and intervention, as well as with venue enumeration, respondent driven sampling, and traditional recruitment methods.
email: sdchandler@ufl.edu Tel:(352)-294-1617
Co-Investigator/ Director, UF Bureau of Economic and Business Research/ Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Dr. McCarty is widely recognized in the field of social network analysis as an expert in the application of personal network analysis to a broad range of topics, including substance abuse and addiction. He has worked on the adaptation of traditional network methods to large-scale telephone and field surveys and the estimation of hard-to-count populations, such as the homeless and those who are HIV positive. His most recent work is in the area of the professional researcher networks, using publication co-authorship and grant co-awardee data as well topic models to describe and analyze researcher networks. He developed a widely used program called EgoNet for the collection and analysis of personal network data.
email: ufchris@ufl.edu Tel: (352)-392-0171
