Keynotespeaker

 

Joshua Smyth

Smyth_neuDr. Smyth is currently a Professor of Biobehavioral Health and Medicine as well as an Associate Director at the Social Science Research Institute and the Children Youth and Family Consortium at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. Between 2000 and 2001, Dr. Smyth has been an Associate Professor and a Director at the Syracuse University. 1994 and 1998, he received his M.A. and PhD in psychology from the Stony Brooks University, USA.

Dr. Smyth is a member of the American Psychosomatic Society, Society of Behavioral Medicine, and American Psychological Association and has been participated in several committees. He was also founding editor of the health section of the Social and Personality Psychology Compass and provided editorial services for the British Journal of Health Psychology and Health Psychology.

Dr. Smyth’s scholarship explores the application of the biopsychosocial model to meaningful health-related processes, contexts, and outcomes, and examines the utility of interventions to positively impact such processes and/or outcomes. Much of his work explores stress—health connections in various ways. Some of his recent work has particularly focused upon using ambulatory methodologies (such as ecological momentary assessment) coupling self-report with biosensing and biomarkers for assessment and delivery of adaptive and just-in-time interventions in real time and natural contexts. Dr. Smyth’s scholarship comprises 150 peer-reviewed articles in journals including Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, Psychoneuroendocrinology, British Journal of Health Psychology, Psychosomatic Medicine, and Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

 

Antonio Nicolucci

Nicolucci_Photo_PortraitSince January 2015 Antonio Nicolucci is scientific director of the Center for Outcomes Research and Clinical Epidemiology, Pescara, Italy. Between 2001 and 2014 Dr. Nicolucci has been Coordinator of the Department of Clinical Pharmacology and Epidemiology and Head of the laboratory of Clinical Epidemiology of Diabetes and Chronic Diseases at the Mario Negri Sud Foundation (formerly Consorzio Mario Negri Sud), Santa Maria Imbaro, Italy. Dr Nicolucci received his MD degree in 1984 and a PhD in Internal Medicine in 1989, both from the University of Chieti. He also received a PhD in Clinical Pharmacology from the Mario Negri Institute, Milan, in 1989.

Dr Nicolucci is a member of several societies and committees related to the management of diabetes including the Italian Diabetes Society, the Self Monitoring Blood Glucose (SMBG) International Working Group and the Executive Committee of the Centre for Diabetes Research of the Italian Association of Diabetologists. He is also Director of the Data Analysis Board of the Italian Diabetes Barometer Observatory, member of the International Publication Planning Committee of the DAWN-2 study and former member of several journal editorial boards, including Nutrition Metabolism and Cardiovascular Disease and Primary Care Diabetes.
Dr Nicolucci’s research interests include design and conduct of randomized clinical trials and meta-analyses, epidemiologic methods used in healthcare research, quality of care evaluation and evaluation of the psycho-social impact of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and their treatments. He is the author of over 200 peer-reviewed articles in journals including Journal of American Medical Association, Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, British Medical Journal, Archives of Internal Medicine, Diabetes Care, Diabetologia.

 

Donna Spruijt-Metz

Spruijt Metz_neuDonna Spruijt-Metz is Director of the USC mHealth Collaboratory at the University of Southern California’s Center for Economic and Social Research (Co-Director, Bill Swartout), and Professor of Research in Psychology. She also holds a complimentary appointment at the Keck School of Medicine, Department of Preventive Medicine. Her main interests include developing data sets that combine sensor and self-report data that are continuous, temporally rich, contextualized. Using this data along with innovative modeling techniques, she wants to develop dynamic, contextualized mathematical models of health-related behavior.

She was one of the first to undertake a just-in-time, adaptive intervention (JITAI) in youth, and envisions most or all interventions being JITAI in the future. Her research focuses on childhood obesity, utilizing mobile health technologies to foster behavior change. including the KNOWME Networks project, that developed a Wireless Body Area Network system to decrease sedentariness and increase physical activity in overweight minority youth using a JITAI. She is PI of Virtual Sprouts, a virtual, multiplatform gardening game designed to change dietary knowledge and behavior in minority youth, and M2FED (modeling and monitoring family eating dynamics, funded by NSF. In 2012, she led an NSF/EU/NIH-funded workshop in Brussels on building new computationally-enabled theoretical models to support health behavior change and maintenance, and just led the follow-up NSF-funded international workshop on this topic in September of this year. She was recently funded by NSF to harness smart-home and wearable technologies to understand family eating dynamics. Her work meshes 21st century technologies with transdisciplinary metabolic, behavioral and environmental research in order to facilitate the development of dynamic, personalized, contextualized behavioral interventions that can be adapted on the fly. She has a deep interest in harnessing mobile health and new media modalities to bring researchers and researched systems into interaction, to engage people in their own data, and to bring about lasting change in public health.