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1. Addiction, Health, & Adolescence (AHA!) Lab
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I do not meet with prospective students in advance of reviewing applications to ensure I have the same information across the pool of applicants, but I do read all applications that list me as a potential advisor. Please note that at Annenberg, individual faculty members do not make admissions decisions. Applications are reviewed by an admissions committee first, then shared with any faculty or labs that might be relevant to applicants’ interests. Please see more resources about applying here.

Being a Graduate Student in the AHA! Lab

Undertaking a PhD is an intense experience, but it can be incredibly rewarding. It is best to undertake a PhD after thinking long and hard about why you want to pursue a PhD. Do you have a strong need to know the answer to questions about the world that keep you up at night? Do you want a job that requires a PhD? Having a goal in mind and a real desire to spend a lot of your time reading academic articles, writing academic papers, collecting data, analyzing data, presenting your work in front of other people, mentoring junior colleagues, all on top of taking courses, conducting research fellowships, and, in some semesters, being a teaching assistant is crucial to see you through the long haul of a PhD program. All the while, you will be challenged with undertaking projects about which you know nothing at first, working through challenges by trial and error, and persisting at tasks that make you feel like you are hitting brick walls until you solve the problem at hand through an AHA! moment or, more commonly, through sheer perseverance and hard work. You will get regular feedback and extensive edits on your writing efforts across more drafts than you had ever anticipated being possible for something you have written. But, it will all be in the service of getting world-class, rigorous education and training that will allow you to answer questions about the world that you care about and that will set you up to flourish in your next steps, be they in academia or industry.

I am excited to work with students who are eager to dive into research. I have strong interests in curiosity, substance use, and emotions, and would be delighted to work with students with interests in those areas. I am also keen to work with students who are interested in health communication (broadly). Notably, there are many other faculty at Annenberg with expertise in health communication with whom the AHA! Lab collaborates, making Annenberg a unique place to pursue your interests in health communication. The main thing that gets me excited to work everyday is anything to do with time, daily life experiences, and dynamics, regardless of the specific application. I strongly recommend reading key lab papers listed below to get a sense of the types of ideas and methods that I am passionate about, expert in, and in which I can provide world-class training. Note that while some of my previous work focused on neuroimaging, this is not something the lab is pursuing with much gusto for the foreseeable future.

If your work connects to any of these themes, then the AHA! Lab will be a rich place to undertake your studies. I meet with graduate students regularly (every two weeks but also more regularly if helpful), love reading, commenting on, and editing drafts of student-led work, support students in developing their own lines of research, and I bring students into research projects with opportunities to lead papers (see the Publications page to see all the papers led by previous students) and present at conferences (with many earning Top Paper awards).

I look forward to receiving your application.

Key Lab Papers

• Clark, J., Vincent, A., Wang, X., McGowan, A. L., & Lydon-Staley, D. M. (2023). Smokers’ curiosity facilitates recall of tobacco-related health information. Health Communication, 38(14), 3357-3365.
• Brinberg, M., & Lydon-Staley, D. M. (2023). Conceptualizing and examining change in communication research. Communication Methods and measures, 17(1), 59-82.
• Lydon-Staley, D. M., Leventhal, A. M., Piper, M. E., Schnoll, R. A., & Bassett, D. S. (2021). Temporal networks of tobacco withdrawal symptoms during smoking cessation treatment. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 130(1), 89.
• Lydon-Staley, D. M., Zhou, D., Blevins, A. S., Zurn, P., & Bassett, D. S. (2021). Hunters, busybodies and the knowledge network building associated with deprivation curiosity. Nature human behaviour, 5(3), 327-336.