With a fascination for natural sciences, Jesse Dallery, Ph.D., once thought he might become an astronomer.
“But then I thought there was still a lot to know about human behavior as well, not just the universe,” he jokes. “I wanted to understand behavior and how we can help people live more fulfilling lives.”
With a doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Emory University, Dallery now applies his expertise to developing technology-based interventions to change behaviors, such as helping people quit using tobacco.
A member of the UF Health Cancer Institute, he is a co-principal investigator with Ramzi Salloum, Ph.D., on the Promote Up study, a five-year comparative effectiveness trial funded by Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).
The trial is comparing two evidence-based mobile health interventions to the Florida Quitline referral system, the standard of care. The mobile health interventions use principles of behavioral psychology to nudge decision-making in more healthy directions. Salloum’s expertise in implementation science complements Dallery’s behavioral psychology expertise, ensuring the technology gets to those who need it the most.
“Our central clinical question is what works, what works for whom and how can we bring those tools to systems of care where they’re not usually present like underserved primary care clinics,” said Dallery, a professor in the UF Department of Psychology. “Tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the developed world. Cessation makes such a huge difference in promoting health and preventing early death.”
The team is about halfway done with recruitment. This year, Dallery received the Top Investigator award from the UF Health Cancer Institute, which funded a pilot study that provided some of the seed data that laid the groundwork for Promote Up.
The promise of technology remains unprecedented because of its ability to deliver evidence-based treatments through smartphones, Dallery said.
“That’s a fact that gives me a lot of hope in the sense that these treatments can reach people that were very difficult to reach before: people in rural areas, people with various disabilities who can’t get adequate transportation, people who lack child care,” he said. “There are a lot of barriers we can circumvent.”
For Dallery, the advent of smartphones changed the work. It’s possible artificial intelligence could further enhance mobile interventions, such as with chatbots that direct people to the aspect of the treatment they need the most, like help managing cravings. But the central goal remains the same.
“The dream has always been to make evidence-based treatment accessible to everyone who needs it,” he said. “The ultimate goal is to make it scalable to the millions of people who need it. We hope that a study like Promote UP that’s focused on implementation science can help us deliver treatment more effectively in the future.”
“The dream has always been to make evidence-based treatment accessible to everyone who needs it.” — Jesse Dallery, Ph.D.
One of the treatments used in the study is based on contingency management, an evidence-based behavioral therapy that focuses on changing behavior through positive reinforcement. The treatment is currently being implemented in several state-level pilot programs, often through Medicaid waivers, an important indicator that it could be implemented on a large scale.
Dallery first saw the power of contingency management to change people’s lives while completing a postdoctoral fellowship in substance use disorders and smoking cessation at Johns Hopkins University.
“The challenge was delivering this intervention for smoking cessation in person because of the need to collect verification that people weren’t smoking,” he said. “That’s where I thought technology could play a role.”
Outside of Promote Up, Dallery’s cancer-focused research includes a collaboration with Moffitt Cancer Center developing a mobile health infrastructure in Florida. His human lab studies focus on understanding basic behavioral mechanisms around decision-making that might lead to unhealthy choices and the effects of nicotine on those processes, such as whether nicotine makes choices more impulsive.
For junior researchers, his advice is to seek out supportive mentors.
“I feel very lucky to be here and it’s because of mentors pointing me in certain directions and helping me make connections that led me here,” he said.
