Dr. Sawyer-Morris Receives a NIDA Diversity Supplement to Map Determinants of Implementation Disparities in Addiction and Pain Research using Machine Learning and Stakeholder Engagement

FRI is pleased to announce that Dr. Ginnie Sawyer-Morris has received a diversity supplement from the National Institute on Drug Abuse entitled, “Use of topic modeling and stakeholder engagement to map determinants of implementation disparities in addiction and pain research.” This supplement is an extension of the NIDA-funded HD2A Research Adoption Support Center (RASC) at Stanford University (parent award U2CDA057717-01, PI: Mark McGovern). The present study will leverage domain expertise (i.e., RASC faculty) and machine learning (ML) to develop and validate a taxonomy that will articulate culturally-relevant and population-specific determinants known to influence implementation disparities in addiction and pain research.  In Aim 1, Dr. Sawyer-Morris will engage stakeholders (including experts in health disparities research and implementation science) to inform the development and refinement of the taxonomy. In Aim 2, off-the-shelf topic modeling algorithm tools (i.e., unsupervised machine learning) will be used to identify, extract, and describe the most important topics in a sample of HEAL research abstracts that address underserved populations. In Aim 3, completeness of the taxonomy will be assessed by examining the consistency between taxonomy categories and the topics extracted from the abstracts via topic modeling, with respect to their co-occurrence and distribution. Results from this project will inform the development of a centralized public use product that assesses key determinants of implementation disparities in addiction and pain research. This supplement also includes a training plan, which is designed to augment Dr. Sawyer-Morris’ current expertise in implementation science and machine learning through methodological trainings at Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and through direct support from her mentorship team: Drs. Mark McGovern (Stanford University), Faye Taxman (George Mason University), Heather Gotham (Stanford University), Steven Carswell (Friends Research Institute), Meredith C. B. Adams (Wake Forest University), and Mitsunori Ogihara (University of Miami).