![\"COM-Emily](\"\/camed\/files\/2017\/06\/Emily-Oot.jpg\")
Emily Oot, a third-year graduate student, has received a national research service award to study risk factors for the initiation of alcohol and drug use during early adolescence. The $106,887 grant is from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).<\/p>\n
The award will provide Oot with valuable training in both functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging (<\/span>MRI) analyses and in the epidemiology of adolescent alcohol use disorders. It also allows Oot to conduct an independent research project, Identifying neurobiological predictors of alcohol use onset during adolescence, <\/em>under a parent study currently underway at McLean Hospital. <\/em>\u201cThis study\u00a0responds to the need for a better understanding of the characteristics\u00a0present prior to initiation of alcohol use that may represent risk factors for use during adolescence,\u201d Oot said.<\/p>\n In her current graduate studies she works with BUSM\u2019s Marlene Oscar-Berman, PhD, as well as McLean Hospital\u2019s Marisa Silveri, PhD, to study alcohol use disorder using structural and functional MRI.<\/p>\n According to Oot, adolescents who have not yet used alcohol or other drugs are being enrolled into the parent study at 13-14 years old for a\u00a0baseline scanning visit and will be followed for two years via annual visits and quarterly surveys to assess initiation of alcohol and substance use and other risky behaviors.\u00a0\u201cData collected will inform\u00a0targets and strategies for prevention and intervention efforts in maladaptive alcohol and substance use,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n Oot is a graduate student in BUSM\u2019s Behavioral Neuroscience PhD program and a fellow in the Transformative Training Program in Addiction Science. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University in 2010 and spent four years performing full-time research. She first worked as a research assistant and lab manager at Georgetown University\u2019s Early Learning Project studying learning and memory in early development. She then received an Intramural Research Training Award from the National Institutes of Health and spent two years at the NIAAA where she studied alcohol craving and dependence using fMRI and an alcohol self-administration paradigm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The award will provide Emily Oot with valuable training in MRI analyses and in the epidemiology of adolescent alcohol use disorders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12772,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[91,143],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48023"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12772"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48023"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48061,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48023\/revisions\/48061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}