Amy Traylor, associate professor of social work, has been awarded a National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Fellowship from the Alcohol and Other Drugs Education Program. The program is housed at the University of Denver’s Butler Institute for Families at the Graduate School of Social Work.
With support from the alcohol institute, the program trains social work faculty and educates social work graduate students in empirically-supported alcohol and other drug identification and treatment methods. The program also incorporates alcohol and other drug content in the curricula of Schools of Social Work nationwide.
For her fellowship, Dr. Traylor will visit the University of Denver June 17-21, 2018, to receive training in an immersion setting from an interdisciplinary group of senior scholars in the field. Her travel, lodging, food, and training is all fully-funded through a National Institute of Health/National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism grant. Fellows also receive a small stipend for participation in the research component of the training. As part of the research component of the study, Dr. Traylor’s students will complete a survey.
Dr. Traylor’s research interests include issues related to adolescent and young adult substance abuse and mental health, as well as the use of emerging technologies in social work research, practice, and education. In 2014, she was awarded a National Institutes of Health grant to develop and test virtual environments aimed at providing a novel intervention component for adolescents receiving treatment for marijuana use. Her virtual reality laboratory is one of three dedicated virtual reality labs housed in a school of social work in the country. The use of virtual reality technology in assessing reactions to drug cues is a common theme in Dr. Traylor’s research collaborations. Her previous work also has included assessing reactions to smoking, alcohol, and marijuana cues in adult populations. Her studies have been published in journals ranging from Addictive Behaviors to CyberPsychology & Behavior.
A native of Tuscaloosa, Dr. Traylor is a graduate of the UA School of Social Work’s MSW Program. She received her PhD from the University of Georgia, where she was a graduate research assistant at the Virtual Reality Clinical Research Center, working on several National Institute of Health funded projects exploring virtual reality and drug craving.
About the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism is one of the 27 institutes and centers that comprise the National Institutes of Health. The institute supports and conducts research on the impact of alcohol use on human health and well-being. It is the largest funder of alcohol research in the world.