NIDA has awarded postdoctoral fellowships to scientists from France, Spain, and Thailand. The NIDA-supported fellows will work with mentors who are NIDA grantees at the mentors’ institutions in the United States. The fellows are:
NIDA-Inserm Postdoctoral Drug Abuse Research Fellows
- Marine Azevedo Da Silva, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow at the Inserm Pierre Louis Institute for Epidemiology and Public Health in Paris, will spend her fellowship working with Silvia Martins, M.D., Ph.D., Columbia University. At Inserm, Dr. Da Silva has explored the association between the trajectories of socioeconomic status, psychosocial work factors, organizational change, and suicide mortality risk in the électricité de France-Gaz de France (GAZEL) cohort study. At Columbia, she will use data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health to (1) compare changes in marijuana and/or tobacco use, abuse, and dependence in individuals living in states that legalized recreational marijuana (Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington) with contemporaneous changes in states that have not passed recreational marijuana laws; (2) compare pre- and post-legalization changes in marijuana and tobacco use, abuse, and dependence within the states that legalized recreational marijuana; and (3) identify specific effects of recreational marijuana laws on changes in marijuana and tobacco use, abuse, and dependence according to sociodemographic characteristics.
- Anissa Barra, a Ph.D. candidate at the Inserm Institut de Neurobiologie de la Méditerranée, will spend her fellowship working with Yasmin Hurd, Ph.D., Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Ms. Barra is expected to receive her doctorate in December 2017 when she completes a longitudinal study on synaptic transmission and behavior in rats exposed to cannabis. Her Inserm doctoral supervisor mentor is former NIDA INVEST Fellow Olivier Manzoni, who is now director of the Inserm laboratory in Marseille. In New York, Ms. Barra will study the effects of cannabinoid exposure during prenatal and postnatal lactation developmental periods on the transcriptome, epigenetic modifications, and synaptic plasticity in adulthood. She hopes to identify pathway-specific alterations in the striatum related to developmental exposure to THC and cannabidiol.
INVEST Drug Abuse Research Fellows
- Judit Tirado-Muñoz, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at Institut Hospital del Mar d’Investigacions Mèdiques (IMIM) in Spain, has been selected for an INVEST fellowship with Daniel Werb, Ph.D., University of California San Diego. She will conduct a secondary analysis of data from the multi-country, mixed-methods PReventing Injecting by Modifying Existing Responses (PRIMER) study to investigate (1) the potential role of intimate partner violence (IPV) in increasing the risk that people who inject drugs (PWID) initiate others into drug injecting; (2) the potential role of psychiatric comorbidities in heightening the risk that PWID initiate others into drug injecting; (3) whether the association between IPV and injection initiation is mediated by psychiatric comorbidities and, conversely, whether the association between psychiatric comorbidities and injection initiation is mediated by IPV victimization; and (4) how IPV and psychiatric comorbidities influence individual pathways to, and socio-structural context for, entry into injection drug use.
- Darika Saingam, Ph.D., a researcher at the Thai Substance Abuse Academic Network and Centre for Alcohol Studies, Prince of Songkla University, will spend her fellowship with Edward W. Boyer, Ph.D., M.D., Harvard Medical School. Dr. Saingam will conduct a secondary data analysis of (1) the relationship among the use of kratom, alcohol, tobacco, and other substances by regular kratom users; (2) health status of kratom users in southern Thailand; and (3) patterns of kratom use as a substitute for alcohol and other narcotic drugs.