Professor goes to Summer Institute By: Caroline West

Assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Matthew Whited, was selected to attend a summer institute to receive advanced training to design clinical trials with interventions.

Clinical trials are research studies with control and experimental groups, where participants are brought in to receive treatments that change their behavior. The researcher then tests the treatment to see if it affects participants’ health in various ways.

The Summer Institute will provide Whited with training to conduct randomized clinical trials for researchers and health professionals interested in developing skills in planning, design and execution of randomized clinical trials involving behavioral interventions. This 10-day training course is sponsored by the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research at the National Institutes of Health and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

“I’m very grateful to the National Institutes of Health and all of the people who are funding it… they are investing in us as researchers; they are putting forth money into us because they know we are going to use the knowledge we gain to go and teach it to other people and use it ourselves,” said Whited.

The course will be held at the Arlie Conference Center in Warrenton, Virginia and begins July 20.

During the course, Whited will receive training from more than 10 faculty members with expertise in fields like psychology, cardiovascular diseases, behavioral medicine and randomized clinical trials.

“It’s really cool for me to do something like this because it’s 10 straight days of learning… I’m not in classes anymore. To set aside 10 whole days to really sit there with this group and learn- it is a rare opportunity, so I’m super excited about it,” Whited said.

The information presented at the institute is important to Whited’s current research. In his research, Whited hopes to understand the reasons for the association between depression and cardiovascular disease and identify behavioral interventions that contribute to efforts that prevent and postpone cardiovascular disease.

“Designing control groups is really tough; that’s one of the biggest things that I want to learn at the summer institute… then the other part I want to learn is some of the statistics and data analysis,” said Whited.

Whited is excited about representing the university at the institute and is looking forward to meeting and interacting with other researchers.

“I hope to bring back what I’ve learned to ECU to not only improve my own research but to spread this knowledge to our graduate students in the Health Psychology PhD program,” he said.

Whited received his bachelor’s degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and received his master’s and doctorate degrees from West Virginia University.

In 2013 he was named College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics’ 2013 Young Alumni Award recipient at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

He joined the university in 2011 and currently leads the Depression Specialty Service in the university’s Psychology Department’s PASS clinic.

You may contact this writer at new@theeastcarolinian.com.







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