Spotlight

The pandemic continues to impact our lives in ways we're still struggling to understand. That's why ARG scientist Priscilla Martinez, PhD, and colleagues are working to better understand how the Covid-19 pandemic affected us, in particular our alcohol and substance use, co-use and mental health. Research team members include Cat Munroe, Thomas K. Greenfield, William C. Kerr, Deidre Patterson, Yu Ye, and Libo Li. The new NIAAA-funded longitudinal study will look at how alcohol and substance … [Read more...]

It was when working with survivors of sexual assault that Cat Munroe identified gaps in how these survivors are perceived by those working within the medical and criminal justice systems. Cat saw first-hand how people interacted with survivors and found approaches lacking an emotional connection. While volunteering as a victim advocate for sexual assault victims and years later, as a trainee providing clinical services to sexual assault survivors in a college counseling services, they witnessed … [Read more...]

As our organization continues to grow with new grants and projects, we've recently hired research staff to support and build on the work we do. We're thrilled and so inspired by the breadth of  experience, expertise, and savviness our new hires bring to ARG. Pamela Trangenstein, PhD joins us as a scientist and brings to ARG her work on spatial analysis, alcohol and cannabis use and related harms, policy evaluation and translational research. As a former ARG/UC Berkeley post-doctoral … [Read more...]

ARG has been awarded a National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) grant to support the continuation of the National Alcohol Research Center. The funding will allow the Center to further its work through to 2026. The grant will support two core components and four research projects that focus on addressing alcohol-related health disparities in order to identify and reduce the effects of economic or social disadvantage on public health outcomes. The Administrative Core, led … [Read more...]

For a decade or more, research has shown that alcohol increases the risk of several different cancers, yet most people are unaware of this link and the harms drinking can cause. A new ARG project, in collaboration with UCSF, seeks to change that by raising awareness among young women that alcohol use is a risk factor for breast cancer. To learn more about this unique project, we sat down with Principal Investigator and Scientist Priscilla Martinez, to talk about the study, what it’s like to … [Read more...]

The treatment and recovery research undertaken by ARG scientists involves assessing service options, both formal and informal, to understand treatment utilization, help determine clinical best practices and make recommendations that assist people on their road to recovery. Our studies have measured outcomes of participating in 12-step programs and their alternatives, assessed the positive outcomes experienced by residents of sober living houses, reviewed effectiveness of counseling … [Read more...]

Since the mid-1960s, the National Alcohol Survey (NAS) has been collecting data on how Americans drink – who’s drinking, how much, how often, and where, as well as the problems that arise from our patterns of consumption. A lot has changed since the early surveys – we’ve been to the moon and back and can now reach the other side of the world with the click of a mouse – and with these changes, the NAS has grown, adapted, and become an even more essential tool in understanding alcohol’s effects on … [Read more...]

Led by Co-PIs Katherine Karriker-Jaffe and Thomas K. Greenfield, the project on Alcohol’s Harms to Others Among US Adults: Individual and Contextual Effects wrapped up recently after resulting in multiple published works, with several new publications on the horizon. The project, which looked at how someone’s drinking affects their spouse or partner or other family member including children, used data from four cycles of ARG’s National Alcohol Survey (NAS), including the latest completed in … [Read more...]

As part of this year's 60th anniversary celebration, we sat down with Robin Room to talk about ARG’s history and his role in shaping its development. Dr. Room began his career in 1963, first as a field worker on one of ARG’s initial alcohol surveys before becoming the scientific director in 1977 through to 1993. Since his tenure at ARG, Dr. Room has lead centers in Canada, Sweden and most recently, Australia where he directed and inaugurated the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research (CAPR) at … [Read more...]