A Florida State University researcher has received more than $2 million in funding to help develop a cellphone application that will enable people to access digital interventions for anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders.

Brad Schmidt, FSU distinguished research professor and director of FSU’s Anxiety and Behavioral Health Clinic, will use the National Institute of Mental Health grant to partner with Oui Therapeutics to create an app and chatbot that deliver therapeutic treatment to participants with anxiety sensitivity.

“In my research career, I have become more interested in addressing treatment dissemination,” said Schmidt, who also serves as psychology chair. “There’s a common issue of having strong treatments, especially for various anxiety conditions, but due to the long-term administration time and highly trained clinicians necessary to administer treatment, it can be very expensive and prohibitively inaccessible. The research this grant supports is a new and different pathway that will prove useful in treating these conditions.”

Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health concerns in the U.S., according to the National Alliance for Mental Illness, and they affect more than 40 million adults and about 7% of children ages 3-17 annually. The National Center for PTSD notes about 5% of American adults experience PTSD each year. Using efficient mobile technology opens a new avenue in addressing treatment access for these individuals.

Schmidt’s self-guided treatment doesn’t require patients to be re-exposed to traumatic events and is significantly less invasive than common types of cognitive behavioral treatments, such as exposure therapy, that involve confronting issues.

Anxiety is related to several other clinical diagnoses, such as PTSD, so consistent use of the rules-based chatbot therapy treatment, which has already shown success in treatment results, can reduce symptoms stemming from various issues.

Through this grant, Oui Therapeutics — a company led by Yale University psychiatrists that develops digital therapeutic solutions to mental health problems — will also seek FDA approval for the treatment to ensure regulatory measures are in place to prevent negative impacts on at-risk individuals and to make it accessible to patients who need it.

“Having these great colleagues and collaborators allows us all to achieve state-of-the-art innovative projects like this particular grant. We’re working to give people their lives back.”

– Brad Schmidt, director of FSU’s Anxiety and Behavioral Health Clinic

“The company’s ability to develop chatbot technology and smartphone applications allows our research team to employ treatments in a new way to reach new patients,” Schmidt said. “Without this partnership, it would be much harder to optimize our treatments for people.”

Trials will measure the reduction of PTSD symptoms in participants using a PTSD checklist based on guidelines from the American Psychological Association and will monitor symptom changes during and after treatments. Schmidt and his team will convert their treatments measuring anxiety sensitivity into technical language, work with Oui Therapeutics to determine effective dosages, develop the chatbot targeting anxiety sensitivity and create a streamlined delivery system through application development.

“Oui Therapeutics has experience with the technical aspects of application development, allowing us to provide a product that will be easy for people to find and accessible for people of different income levels,” Schmidt said. “Patients can access treatment and get a lot out of it.”

FSU Psychology Professor Jesse Cougle, who leads the Cougle Lab in its research into anxiety, problematic anger and obsessive-compulsive disorders, will lead the grant in its trials measuring anxiety sensitivity and the application’s impact.

“It’s great to partner with companies such as Oui Therapeutics that have technical expertise in product development and can adapt their skills and our research for widespread use, and I’m happy to be involved in running the trials on such a high-stakes subject,” Cougle said. “Treatment underutilization is a huge problem and is more complex than people realize. These treatments have the potential to reach a lot of people who would benefit as they may not have had access to anything like it before.”

This grant is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health’s Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs through Yale University and Oui Therapeutics.

“FSU’s Department of Psychology is one of the best clinical research departments in the country,” Schmidt said. “Having these great colleagues and collaborators allows us all to achieve state-of-the-art innovative projects like this particular grant. We’re working to give people their lives back.”

Improving how health care services get to the patients who need it is a focus of FSU Health, a bold initiative of Florida State University to build healthy communities in North Florida and beyond.

To learn more about research conducted in FSU’s Department of Psychology, visit psychology.fsu.edu. For more information on FSU’s Anxiety and Behavioral Health Clinic, visit the clinic online.

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Florida State University researchers are part of a multi-institution team that has received nearly $3.4 million to conduct a five-year investigation into how patients seeking care may be treated differently when providers themselves are under the weather or fearful of becoming sick.

Anastasia Makhanova, FSU psychology alumna and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas, is the principal investigator for the National Institutes of Health-funded grant that also includes FSU Assistant Professor of Anthropology Eric Shattuck and Professors of Psychology Jon Maner and Ashby Plant. FSU’s share of the grant is $539,479.

The full team, with contributors hailing from six institutions including the University of Texas at San Antonio, University of Arkansas, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, University of New Mexico, and Loma Linda University, will evaluate if adverse situational conditions, or ASC, cause subtle differences in physician behavior, potentially impacting patient outcomes and treatment bias.

“R01 research grants are the top tier of NIH funding,” said Shattuck, whose work explores connections between the immune system and social interaction. “They are highly competitive and fund projects over five years, so our work can be adequately developed. We are at a point in science where many problems we are trying to solve require perspectives from different fields, and I am delighted NIH saw our interdisciplinary team as a strength.”

In this research, ASC for health care providers includes two categories: the provider being sick and the provider’s fear of becoming sick. The former leads to a temporary increase in inflammation as one’s immune system fights off the infection. The latter refers to cues of pathogen threat such as visibly sick patients and rising rates of influenza or COVID-19.

Prior research shows that pathogen threat can affect how individuals relate and interact with others, and inflammation can biologically impact cognition, leading to such symptoms as brain fog. The team will also study stress and burnout as ASC for providers.

“The project is an ideal example of interdisciplinary research, as it takes scientific discovery and translates it into something immediately valuable and useful for health practitioners.”

– Jon Maner, professor psychology

“ASC can increase disparities in the quality of care that racial and ethnic minority patients receive,” said Plant, who specializes in bias regulation and examines the quality of relations among people of different identities. “Unlike projects that focus on reducing bias directly, which often are only modestly effective, we are identifying and targeting the conditions that impact health care providers and their job performance.”

Two studies are planned to test the ways ASC impacts physicians’ treatment of patients. In the first, physicians will be given either the seasonal flu vaccine or a placebo. Those who receive the vaccine will experience mild increases in immune system activity, triggering the feeling of powering through work when sick. When compared with the physicians’ initial survey responses on ASC, the researchers can determine if greater acute inflammation is associated with more biased treatment.

In the second study, another group of physicians will be surveyed on how they are feeling both emotionally and physically, and responses will be compared to patients’ charts from the same day. Using data collected over one year, this study will determine if providers are more vulnerable to bias on days when they experience more versus less ASC.

“I am excited to increase the external validity of our future findings,” Makhanova said. “This research helps us better understand situational pressures that can make health care providers more vulnerable to biased decision-making, especially towards patients from minority groups.”

Makhanova is a two-time FSU alumna who earned her master’s degree in 2016 and doctorate in 2019, both in social psychology. As a student, she conducted research with both Plant and Maner, and also began collaborating with Shattuck shortly after joining UA’s faculty in 2019.

“This project includes researchers in psychology, anthropology, public health and medicine, building bridges between social science and community health clinics,” said Maner, an expert on the connections among motivation, emotion and social cognition. “The project is an ideal example of interdisciplinary research, as it takes scientific discovery and translates it into something immediately valuable and useful for health practitioners.”

Research is an important component of FSU Health, a major university initiative to improve health and health care delivery. Visit fsuhealth.fsu.edu to learn more about how researchers and partners in clinical practice are working together to build healthier communities in North Florida and beyond.

To learn more about psychology research and the FSU Department of Psychology, visit psychology.fsu.edu. For more information on the FSU Department of Anthropology, visit anthro.fsu.edu.

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A Florida State University researcher has secured funding for a four-year project focused on gathering data to determine best practices surrounding speech-language therapy approaches in elementary schools.

Kelly Farquharson, an associate professor in FSU’s School of Communication Science and Disorders, was awarded a $2.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) alongside co-principal investigator Katy Cabbage of Washington State University and methodologist Christopher Schatschneider, FSU professor of psychology and associate director of the Florida Center for Reading Research.

“I am beyond delighted that Dr. Farquharson’s research has been supported by the NIH,” said Michelle Kazmer, dean of the College of Communication and Information. “This generous funding will allow the important research being conducted by Dr. Farquharson and her colleagues to have a substantially increased impact on children’s reading and language skills and how they can be improved through school-based speech-sound therapy. The College of Communication and Information is fortunate to have researchers such as Dr. Farquharson on our faculty.”

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) play an important role in schools, offering services to children needing extra support and intervention to reach language and communication goals. At each research site, Farquharson’s team will partner with 10 SLPs and 50 students, each year for 4 years, to gather data that uncovers the contexts in which certain children improve due to school-based speech-sound therapy.

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A Florida State University neuroscientist has received new funding to conduct research that aims to advance our understanding of how obesity and overnutrition affect the nervous system.

Debra Ann Fadool, distinguished research professor of Biological Science and Neuroscience, will use the $2.7 million grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to probe the links between metabolism, diet and the olfactory bulb, the part of our brain that enables our sense of smell.

“We want to know how the olfactory bulb communicates with other areas of the brain that regulate metabolism and how these connections and communications change depending on the diet consumed by an individual,” said Fadool, who holds appointments in the Department of Biological Science, the Program in Neuroscience and the Institute of Molecular Biophysics.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity affects more than 115 million adults and children in the U.S. and obesity-related health complications account for nearly $150 billion annually in health care costs. Worldwide, obesity rates have nearly tripled in the last five decades.

“Dr. Fadool’s innovative work addresses an important but understudied question regarding the association between olfaction and metabolic function,” said Lisa Eckel, director of the Program in Neuroscience. “Understanding how metabolic imbalance impacts olfactory function, which plays a critical role in regulating food intake, could lead to new, less invasive treatments for obesity and obesity-related disease.”

Using brain mapping strategies, researchers can identify which genes are activated when the olfactory bulb communicates with other areas of the brain. Fadool said the team must first map olfactory-to-brain connections in mice, then determine if the map is state-dependent, or closely aligned to the subject’s state of health.

By manipulating the nutritional content of a diet, they hope to discover the connections that exist when a subject consumes a diet lacking in beneficial nutrition and what connections are active when an individual is at a healthy body weight.

“We want to know how the olfactory bulb communicates with other areas of the brain that regulate metabolism and how these connections and communications change depending on the diet consumed by an individual.”

– Debra Fadool, distinguished research professor of Biological Science and Neuroscience

“This grant will also allow us to see how the gut and the brain communicate with one another,” Fadool said. “If we manipulate tension in the gut, or if we change the composition of the diet’s nutrition in the digestive tract, we want to then examine potential changes in the electrical activation of the brain. If the mapped information from the olfactory system is changed due to modified activity of the gut, we want to know how that could subsequently change the detection of a food’s chemical cue, which then could affect satiety, taste and so on.”

This grant will also support the work of two graduate students, a postdoctoral researcher, a lab technician and two other FSU collaborators — Linda Rinaman, professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Hedi Mattoussi, distinguished research professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Rinaman, an expert anatomist, studies how to characterize the functional multisynaptic organization of neural systems. Mattoussi’s specialty is understanding interfaces between inorganic nanocrystals and biological systems, which will assist the team in tethering chemicals to be delivered to the brain via nanoparticles.

“This type of research is really a team effort, especially because the content of your nutrition affects the health of every single one of your organ systems — the brain included,” Fadool said. “Obesity research takes a long time because of its complexity and the need to observe the effects of variables over time, so we hope our work in mouse models will help shorten the focus of what to test in clinical cases or human trials.”

Fadool is the director of the National Institutes of Health Chemosensory Grant Training Program at FSU that has been in place for over 30 years to guide and develop predoctoral and postdoctoral scientists transition to successful careers exploring the senses of smell and taste.

As one of the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases funds research developing knowledge about and treatments for diseases that are among the most chronic, costly and consequential for patients, their families and the country.

To learn more about Fadool’s research, visit dfadool.neuro.fsu.edu.

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A Florida State University researcher has received a five-year, $1.86 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how a little-understood part of the brain affects our sense of smell.  

Assistant Professor of Psychology Adam Dewan will lead a study of the dorsal tenia tecta, a brain region that receives input from the olfactory bulb but has no known function. Dewan’s team will investigate this region to find out how it’s connected to other parts of the brain, how neurons within this region respond to odor and its overall contribution to our sense of smell.  

WHAT DO THE RESEARCHERS AIM TO FIGURE OUT?    

• How the dorsal tenia tecta talks to other parts of the brain. From flowers to pizza, the odors we encounter consist of hundreds or even thousands of individual volatile chemicals. Our brain forms a perceptual impression of this heterogeneous stimulus to allow us to recognize a specific scent. This is a challenging task that requires multiple interconnected brain areas. By understanding how the dorsal tenia tecta is connected to these other regions, Dewan’s team hopes to gain a greater understanding of the network that underlies our sense of smell.  

• What odor components make the dorsal tenia tecta excited. We are reliant on our sense of smell to not only detect odors in our environment, but also to identify them, determine their intensity and decide whether we like them or not. By discovering how the dorsal tenia tecta responds to these different features of odor, Dewan’s team will take another step toward deciphering how our brain encodes different smells.   

• What job the dorsal tenia tecta has in our smell puzzle. The organization of the dorsal tenia tecta appears to be fundamentally different from other olfactory brain regions. Dewan and his team think that this uniqueness signifies a distinct role for this region in odor perception.    

HOW COULD THIS RESEARCH HELP PEOPLE? As the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted, there is an intimate link between our sense of smell and well-being. It plays a vital role in our daily lives, influencing our food choices and social interactions and helping us detect danger. Understanding the intricacies of how our brains process odors can have profound implications for our overall health and quality of life. Dewan’s research will take a major step toward answering this question by providing the first in-depth characterization of the dorsal tenia tecta.     

WHO’S INVOLVED? Graduate student Samuel Caton and research technician Austin Pauley will play essential roles in this project. Roberto Vincis, assistant professor of biology, and Cecilia Bouaichi, a graduate student in the Vincis Laboratory, are important collaborators. 

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Florida State University has been awarded a $72.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to redesign and improve HIV prevention and care interventions in adolescents and young adults in the United States.
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