SUMMIT Lab

Welcome to the SUMMIT Lab!

Substance Use Mechanisms, Motivations, and Interventions for Teens

Being a teenager is challenging. Navigating puberty, living in an increasingly complex world, managing increased demands at school, trying to understand who and what’s important to you, striving for more autonomy from parents, and spending more time socializing with friends… it’s all a lot. Given all these challenges, people typically begin using substances (e.g., alcohol, cannabis, nicotine) during the teenage years. Adolescent substance use is a public health concern due to its associations with other mental health conditions, altered brain development, increased risk for having a substance use disorder in adulthood, and early mortality. Here in the SUMMIT lab, we seek to help adolescents successfully navigate the teenage years by studying how to best reduce the risks of initiating, escalating, or continuing to use substances. We are particularly interested in the role of social relationships, such as peer and caregiver relationships, and how they interact with multiple levels of influence (e.g., temperament, schools, neighborhoods) to influence adolescent substance use etiology and treatment.

The overarching questions that guide our work include:

1. What are the developmental pathways leading to adolescent substance use?
2. What are the key ingredients of adolescent substance use treatments that lead to behavior change?
3. How do we leverage developmental science and work on key ingredients to improve and scale adolescent substance use treatments?