Oregon Social Learning Center (OSLC), the non-profit, collaborative, multidisciplinary research center with a long history of collaboration with UO scientists, announced the receipt of a $9 million grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse to launch the Translational Drug Abuse Prevention Center (TDAP). The grant is one of the largest ever received by OSLC.

The project, led by scientists Patricia Chamberlain (OSLC) and UO psychology professor Phil Fisher, includes ten other scientists from OSLC and its partner organizations. Researchers will collaborate to create a national resource for cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research with studies spanning from basic science to implementation research in U.S. child welfare systems. Children and adolescents involved in child welfare are among the most disadvantaged individuals in American society and are at greatly elevated risk for drug use and related problems including delinquency, teen pregnancy, poor physical and mental health, homelessness, incarceration, and HIV-risk behaviors.

“This research will have high potential impact on shaping future science, practice, and policy,” Chamberlain says. “We will build upon a foundation of more than 25 federally funded studies in child welfare that have been conducted at the Oregon Social Learning Center.” 

The TDAP extends the researchers’ previous work in three research project areas: 

• Project No. 1 is aimed at developing a comprehensive understanding of the neural basis of risk-taking behaviors for adolescents in the child welfare system. This work could shed light on how to decrease long-term vulnerabilities. 
• Project No. 2 focuses on preventing HIV-risk behaviors and on factors that go in to intimate partner selection choices in high school girls. This project builds on existing OSLC intervention work previously done with middle school girls.
• Project No. 3 studies the implementation of two OSLC-developed, evidence-based parenting models delivered by New York City case workers to foster, kinship, biological, and adoptive parents involved in the city’s child welfare system. Currently, OSLC scientists are working with more than 200 case workers who serve more than 2,000 children and families in that system.

The Translational Drug Abuse Prevention Center is a National Institute of Drug Abuse Center of Excellence. Centers of Excellence are selected because they have outstanding innovative science, and serve as national resources to provide educational/outreach activities to drug abuse research communities, educational organizations, the general public and policy makers. The center will also support the development of carefully selected small-scale studies designed to lead to innovative, new independent research projects led by early career, and minority researchers in the area of prevention of drug abuse and HIV-risk in the CWS. An external Advisory Board is composed of leaders, policy makers and experts in child welfare services.

- by UO Office of Research, Innovation and Graduate Education