Adrienne Johnson, Ph.D., is a new postdoctoral fellow at the UW Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention (UW-CTRI) and the William S. Middleton Memorial Veteran’s Hospital, supported by a VA Advanced Fellowship in Women’s Health. She is working with UW-CTRI Associate Director of Research, Dr. Megan Piper, for the next two years. Dr. Johnson’s first project will be to analyze the Wisconsin Smokers’ Health Study 2 psychiatric diagnosis data (CIDI). Her overall research interests center on understanding and treating cigarette smoking among difficult-to-treat populations. Specifically, she is interested in conducting two interrelated lines of research.
The first line of research will examine cognitive-affective factors (i.e., emotion dysregulation, distress tolerance, anxiety sensitivity) that may impede smoking-cessation efforts among individuals with anxiety psychopathology, neurological disorders, and women. Building on the theoretical framework from this first line of work, her second line of research will focus on developing and evaluating targeted cessation treatments for these difficult-to-treat smokers. This research will utilize principles from implementation science in order to address issues of reach (i.e., participation rate of the targeted population), implementation (i.e., intervention integrity and quality), and adoption (i.e., system-level factors associated with intervention use) in medical settings to decrease the delay from scientific testing to treatment delivery for these special populations.
Johnson received her bachelor’s degree in psychology and philosophy from UW. She then worked for two years at UW-CTRI as a health counselor on the TTURC-2 study. Using skills she learned while working as a health counselor, Johnson went on to obtain her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Cincinnati, with a focus in health psychology. She completed her pre-doctoral clinical internship at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Johnson is enjoying working at UW-CTRI again.