WUSTL ichasm

September is National Recovery Month, and we have been excited to connect with our partners for community events! On September 14th, some of our team members attended the Recovery Coalition of Greater St. Louis’ 2024 Recovery Fest and helped with event set up and selling event t-shirts to fundraise for the organization. They heard hope stories from community members involved in different recovery centers and connected with colleagues at partner organizations, like Hilljack House, St. Louis Empowerment Center, and ARCA.
Eastern Region-Missouri Coalition of Recovery Support Providers

Recently, our PI Dr. Cavazos Rehg traveled to Uganda, meeting with collaborators based in the Brown School, Muni University and other local universities in Uganda to establish partnerships between universities. In our lab, we are currently working with Brown School collaborators to pilot test an app-based intervention for adolescents with HIV and depression in Uganda and hope to continue collaborating on projects involving mHealth and mental health research.

Our collaborators at UTHealth and University of South Carolina leveraged large language models to analyze Reddit users’ intentions to quit va**ng and compared the results of a GPT-4 model and human evaluators. The GPT-4 model was able to remain consistent to annotation guidelines and detect nuanced quit-va**ng intentions. These findings emphasize how GPT-4 is a useful tool for improving large scale social media data analysis, particularly when identifying users’ quitting intentions. Dr. Cavazos-Rehg has been working closely with these collaborators in the development of these detection models to optimize proactive outreach strategies on social media with the future goal of delivering timely, accessible mHealth interventions for va**ng cessation. Read more here: https://tinyurl.com/yupv6kmt

Utilizing Large Language Models to Identify Reddit Users Considering Va**ng Cessation for Digital Interventions The widespread adoption of social media platforms globally not only enhances users' connectivity and communication but also emerges as a vital channel for the dissemination of health-related information, thereby establishing social media data as an invaluable organic data resource for public health....

JaNiene Peoples presented a poster at the 2022 College on Problems of Drug Dependence’s (CPDD) 84th annual Scientific Meeting. The poster focused on how “lack of readiness to stop using” is associated with substance use disorder (SUD) symptoms and other barriers to treatment.

🔷 iCHASM STAFF SPOTLIGHT 🔷

China is home for Xiao but she has been living in Saint Louis for 6 years and counting!

Xiao's favorite part of working in the iCHASM lab is our lovely team members; everyone provides support to each other.

A fun fact about Xiao is that she loves fried chicken!

Xiao is most passionate about learning new skills/ideas/topics and applying them to answer research questions.

On Xiao’s days off she enjoys cooking, baking, playing with her chinchilas, and going for hikes with her dog.

A mantra Xiao lives by is “don’t change who you are”.

Thank you for all you do, Xiao!