In this seminar, Dr. Stapleton will reflect on his experiences and challenges in developing cancer prevention and control interventions. He will describe a series of iterative studies to develop and refine an intervention to reduce melanoma risk among young adult women. These interventions seek to ensure the delivery of quality survivorship care and incorporate key elements of shared decision-making to promote quality of life, utilization of supportive care services, and informed clinical trial enrollment. He will describe how the initial web-based intervention evolved to reflect the input of users and emerging behavior change theory, culminating in a recently completed clinical trial to test an intervention delivered via social media and incorporating elements of mindfulness and acceptance. He will also discuss the design process for his ongoing and planned intervention trials that target rural cancer survivors.
Although the rapid pace of these advances provides exciting new opportunities, the process of developing interventions that simultaneously and sufficiently address key research findings, incorporate evidence-supported intervention strategies, and meet the needs of potential users can be quite challenging. For example, a multi-component intervention may address a comprehensive set of key risk factors but expense and delivery complexity may lead to questionable potential for dissemination if effective. Conversely, the preferences of potential users for receiving intervention content may be inconsistent with evidence-based methods for producing behavior change. In both examples, researchers are faced with making difficult intervention design decisions without clear data, metrics, or comprehensive intervention design frameworks to guide decision-making.
The fields of prevention science and behavioral medicine have experienced substantial growth, fueling advances in health behavior theory and an ever-expanding body of evidence of factors that influence health behavior. Behavior change methodologies also continue to evolve as technology provides new avenues for the design and delivery of health interventions.
The emergence of dissemination and implementation and user-centered design frameworks have promoted a greater focus on ensuring that, if efficacious, interventions can be useful in practice by reaching key populations.
The Penn State Cancer Institute and the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center are co-hosting this event.
About the Speaker
Dr. Jerod Stapleton is a Professor of Health, Behavior & Society and serves as the Assistant Director for Population Science Education and Mentoring at the Markey Cancer Center at UK Healthcare. Dr. Stapleton is a prevention scientist with expertise and research interests that include: (1) conducting mixed methods etiological studies to better understand health behavior through the lens of behavioral and decision-making theories; (2) applying etiological insights and prevention science principles to the design and evaluation of behavioral interventions; and (3) utilizing digital platforms for delivering behavioral interventions. He has a sustained history of federal grant funding, consistently publishes in top-tier journals (nearly 50% with student authors), and he is an active team science collaborator on multiple projects.
Dr. Stapleton is an internationally recognized leader in the field of skin cancer and melanoma prevention. His research focuses on explicating the impact of social, cultural, and policy factors on skin cancer risk behaviors and he has created and tested multiple theory-driven behavioral interventions to reduce cancer risk. His research has been cited by the World Health Organization, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and he has been invited to speak by the National Cancer Institute, the American Academy of Dermatology, and the JAMA Author Network Interviews.
At the University of Kentucky, Dr. Stapleton has expanded his research focus to developing and testing interventions to improve outcomes among cancer survivors in communities throughout Kentucky and beyond. This includes a multi-principal investigator R01 award from the National Cancer Institute, in partnership with the University of Colorado, to test the efficacy of an intervention to increase the utilization of supportive care programs and improve the quality of life among lung cancer survivors living in rural areas of Kentucky. Additional ongoing projects relate to increasing informed participation in clinical trials among individuals diagnosed with cancer and improving the delivery of supportive palliative care to advanced-stage cancer patients.
In his Markey leadership role, Dr. Stapleton develops infrastructure and programming to support scientific education, trans-disciplinary collaborations, and career success. He has been a dedicated mentor throughout his career to mentees spanning from undergraduate students to early career faculty. His commitment to service is reflected in serving the National Institutes of Health as a standing member of a grant review study section and regular service to the National Cancer Institute as a site visit reviewer for cancer center funding applications.
