Events

We are excited to announce our upcoming Spring and Summer webinars! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic for a future webinar, please reach out to us at EMBRACE@umn.edu.

Spring Webinar

Dr. Jeffrey Birk is an Assistant Professor of Medical Science at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He is an affective psychologist with a background in psychophysiology and emotion regulation. Dr. Birk’s research examines psychological factors and health behaviors in cardiovascular patient populations, including cardiac arrest and acute coronary syndrome. He has developed mechanism-focused interventions to reduce psychological distress in cardiac patients after acute medical events.

This presentation will introduce a resource designed to guide researchers how to conduct rigorous mechanism-focused research in a step-by-step manner across multiple study designs. This tool was developed as part of the Science Of Behavior Change initiative. The webinar will describe the rationale for mechanism-focused research and the importance of properly measuring the mechanisms that are believed to underlie the potential efficacy of interventions. It will detail how CLIMBR can inform the development, implementation, reporting, and evaluation of mechanism-focused research across a broad range of study designs.

Thursday, May 22, 2025

11 am – 12 pm CT / 12 pm – 1 pm ET
Zoom

Register for the CLIMBR Webinar

Summer Webinar

Dr. David L. Roth is a Professor Emeritus of Geriatric Medicine and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University. He was trained as a clinical psychologist and has considerable expertise as an applied statistician, with over 40 years of experience as an NIH-funded investigator. In addition to his collaborative contributions, Dr. Roth served as a Principal Investigator on multiple R01 grants that examined the health effects (and benefits) of family caregiving using data from large national epidemiological investigations. Although Dr. Roth retired from his full-time academic position in 2024, he continues to be an active scholar and serves as a consultant on multiple funded projects, including the EMBRACE Roybal Center. He has a long history of collaboration with EMBRACE Center leaders.

This presentation will introduce investigators to key decisions that must be made when testing intervention mechanistic hypotheses with statistical mediation methods. Topics will include whether change scores or post-treatment scores should be analyzed, how baseline (pre-treatment) measures should be used as covariates, the importance of selecting mediating variables with very high reliabilities, and the availability of multiple methods for testing the statistical significance of and interpreting the magnitude of the mediated effect.