Angelo DiBello, a new assistant professor in the department of psychology, came to Brooklyn College this semester with a grant to look at the drinking patterns of college students and to test out interventions. Since then, he’s picked up two more grants related to the same research, this time prestigious “R01” grants, the most competitive of the National Institutes of Health’s research awards. “I’m thrilled about being able to do this work here, and I think the trajectory and the questions that I can ask in my research will be completely different being at a place like this,” says DiBello, who started working on one of the grants as an assistant professor at Brown University, a title he continues to hold. The multi-year project is being conducted at Brooklyn College, Brown, and the University of Houston and will involve investigators at all three institutions looking at student alcohol use, among other drugs, and how it relates to issues like their sexual behavior and sexual assault. The researchers will use the data to create a risk profile for each campus and to inform one of two interventions for heavy drinkers that will be deployed in phase two of the project. One will involve “counter- attitudinal advocacy,” an experiment DiBello developed during his postdoctoral work at Brown. “This intervention has been previously used to change people’s political attitudes, to change people’s eating behaviors, and smoking behavior but it has never been applied to college student drinking,” explains DiBello, whose laboratory, where he already works with undergraduates, is the Social Health Addiction & Relationship Processes Laboratory at Brooklyn College. “One of its hallmarks is that it employs a harm reduction approach. We don’t advocate for abstinence. We don’t tell college students they shouldn’t drink. We accept the premise that college students will drink and instead of saying don’t do it, we say we understand that you are going to do it, here are ways that you can do it more safely to avoid blackouts, sexual assault, and some of the really common problems that are associated with high-risk and heavy drinking.” DiBello—who earned his Ph.D. in social psychology in 2015 from the University of Houston and completed his postdoctoral training in 2017 at the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University—says that being at such a diverse institution will allow him to look at some of his research questions in more depth, tracking drinking patterns in different cultural and ethnic groups. “There’s been so little work on diverse populations in this area,” he says. ‘Brooklyn college offers an opportunity to run to those scientific questions, hug them, and provide some answers to them.”
