Dolores Albarracín, the Amy Gutmann Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) University Professor and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC), has received two new National Institutes of Health (NIH) awards to develop and test innovative interventions that use artificial intelligence, communication science, and community engagement to address pressing public health challenges.
Albarracín is a faculty member at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of the policy center’s Communication Science division.
Together, the five-year awards provide more than $1.69 million in first-year funding, including $885,939 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and $812,484 from the National Institute of Mental Health.
Fighting HIV and hepatitis C infection in rural America
“Testing the Effectiveness of a Remote Intervention to Reduce Infection Risk in Rural Areas of the United States” will evaluate a virtual intervention designed to reduce HIV, hepatitis C, and overdose risks in rural communities affected by substance use. The project builds on Albarracín’s earlier work with rural communities in Appalachia and the Midwest, increasing health service use and well-being, and reducing the stigma of substance use in these areas.
The five-year study will bring together people who have recently used substances and members of the broader community in facilitated online groups aimed at increasing social integration, reducing stigma, and promoting healthier behaviors. The researchers will test an artificial intelligence-powered “co-pilot” designed to train and support community facilitators who lead these groups.
“This national rural project is an opportunity to rigorously test a new generation of evidence-based interventions that are ambitious in both their reach and their design,” said Albarracín. “We’re using AI agents, developed from analyses of the intervention conversations, to train and support facilitators, with the goal of making an effective, complex intervention scalable across rural communities.”
Co-investigators are Man-pui Sally Chan, research associate professor at the Annenberg School; Laura Starbird, assistant professor of Family and Community Health at the School of Nursing; Qi Long, Professor of Biostatistics in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Perelman School of Medicine; and Tianlong Chen, assistant professor of Computer Science at UNC Chapel Hill.
Getting the right message to the right person to increase HIV testing in Philadelphia
“Adaptive, Regionally- and Individually-Tailored, AI-Based Intervention to Increase HIV Testing and Prevention in Philadelphia,” a collaboration with the City of Philadelphia, will focus on increasing HIV testing and access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among men who have sex with men.
The five-year study is co-led by Albarracín and José A. Bauermeister, the Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations at Penn’s School of Nursing. Chan and Starbird are co-investigators.
The team will evaluate whether AI-generated, regionally and individually tailored social media and text-message outreach can increase routine HIV testing, improve engagement with PrEP, and support other HIV-prevention outcomes. The intervention will be tested alongside the Philadelphia Department of Public Health’s existing HIV-prevention campaign, Philly Keep On Loving.
“Our partnership with the Department of Public Health gives us a unique opportunity to generate scientific evidence while strengthening real-world implementation by combining community engagement, AI-enabled personalization, and public health practice,” Albarracín said.
Bauermeister agrees: “People’s decisions about HIV testing and prevention are shaped by their individual circumstances as well as the communities and environments in which they live,” he said. “By combining AI-enabled tailoring with community and public health expertise, we can learn how to deliver the right information and services to the right people at the right time.”
Together, the awards reflect Albarracín’s ongoing efforts to understand how communication, social relationships, and emerging technologies can be harnessed to improve public health and expand access to evidence-based prevention and care.
This story was originally published by the Annenberg School for Communication.
