Telzer Lab
Principal Investigator: Eva Haimo Telzer
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary/Abstract An alarming number of adolescents will engage in substance use (including alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and opioids) before they leave high school, a fact that has serious long-term health and societal impacts. Since most adolescents begin using substances with peers, an understanding of the processes that lead to peer influence susceptibility in the context of substance-using peers offers critical avenues for successful intervention in substance use. Our prior research developed a unique performance-based experimental paradigm for measuring peer influence susceptibility and found that individual differences in susceptibility interact with adolescents’ perceptions of their peers’ substance use to predict their own substance use engagement. However, it remains unclear why some adolescents are more susceptible to peer influence than others, and how development confers increased risk for susceptibility. This work will examine the neural correlates associated with individual differences in peer influence susceptibility. Specifically, we will assess how increased functional connectivity within and between neural networks subserving greater sensitivity to social re…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01DA051127-05: Neurobiological susceptibility to peer influence and drug use in adolescence (2025)
- 5R01DA051127-04: Neurobiological susceptibility to peer influence and drug use in adolescence (2024)
- 3R01DA051127-04S1: Neurobiological susceptibility to peer influence and drug use in adolescence (2024)
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