宾州大学公园. -一项新授予的100万美元美国合同.S. 国家 Science Foundation grant will allow a group of multidisciplinary researchers at Penn State, 与佐治亚理工学院合作, to develop an early warning system (EWS) for identifying and responding to emerging substance use threats such as the rise of fentanyl overdoses in our communities.
据主要调查人员称， 《求是陈, assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering and 物质使用和成瘾协会-附属教员, the project will take a multidisciplinary approach to create a data-driven analytical framework.
After working together on several seed grant projects funded through the 社会科学研究所, Qiushi and several colleagues said they hope that developing an EWS tool could potentially help policymakers and other stakeholders to identify high-risk areas of emerging substance use issues. 该项目旨在为实施奠定基础.
“在这个为期四年的项目中, I am thrilled to work with a dream team of my amazing colleagues across different disciplines ranging from system engineering, 机器学习, 犯罪学, 社会学和卫生经济学, as well as practitioners who are at the frontline of compiling the intel about the emerging drug trends to serve the local stakeholders and communities,陈说.
根据陈和他的团队的说法, the goal of developing the tool is to understand the patterns and the driving factors behind substance use. Then local and state stakeholders will develop and utilize strategies to respond to them. The researchers plan for the tool to use geospatial data and predictive modeling to analyze data from different sectors like law enforcement, 卫生保健, prevention and public health to get a better understanding of the spread of substance use impacts in communities and to develop comprehensive solutions to those problems.
Through using publicly available data sets and additional data from local partners, the team aims to develop and demonstrate a proof of concept of their EWS framework. The team will also collaborate with outside stakeholders from two 高强度贩毒地区 (HIDTA)程序和 国家新兴威胁倡议 by seeking their feedback as potential users of the EWS framework.
格伦多, assistant professor of criminal justice at 宾州州立大学阿宾顿分校, a CSUA co-funded faculty member and co-primary investigator on the study, said he hopes that the study will provide the knowledge necessary for translation of these findings to address emerging substance use issues across communities.
“现在, there isn’t a systematic infrastructure in 宾西法尼亚 to support comprehensive data collection and application of results, but other partners at the New England HIDTA have been collecting and linking the data at the local level for a while now, which can be used to enrich the public data sources for developing the EWS tool,斯特纳说. “If we can demonstrate the use of the proposed analytical framework in the case study in this project, it has a great generalizability and can be easily applied to other states and settings, 包括宾夕法尼亚.”
Sterner and the rest of the team plan to utilize an advisory board of partners and other stakeholders to test the viability of the tool. Then the team can assist in putting together intervention strategies to target localities that are currently experiencing an uptick in substance use-related issues. Potential intervention strategies could include enhancing drug testing, 急救人员培训, 有针对性的预防规划, substance use treatment preparedness and targeted harm reduction efforts.
该项目的其他研究人员包括 保罗·格里芬, professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering and CSUA director; 冬青阮, associate professor of sociology, 犯罪学 and public policy; 乔尔·席格, associate professor of health policy and administration and member of the CSUA executive committee; and Weijun谢, assistant professor in the school of industrial and systems engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
