About

Dr. Ridenour’s research has two foci. The first is to understand and translate the etiologies of harmful substance use, conduct problems, and risky sexual behaviors into tools and approaches to help the highest risk children and adolescents avoid these outcomes. Dr. Ridenour’s work follows the biopsychosocial and liability-threshold orientations, recognizing that myriad combinations and varying levels of risk and resiliency factors influence an individual’s development toward or away from health risk behaviors, which also evolve with maturation. Accordingly, the most impactful prevention strategies need to address an individual’s combination of their most salient epigenesis influences. To date, Dr. Ridenour’s research has emphasized (but is far from limited to) assessment of individuals’ profiles of risk and resiliency factors to inform personalized prevention intervention.

The second focus of Dr. Ridenour’s research is to develop and apply clinical trial methods that are designed for rigorous evaluation of individual responses during and after receiving an experimental treatment (Idiographic Clinical Trials or ICTs). Recent collaborations of Dr. Ridenour’s while using ICT methods have: generated R programs to conduct Monte Carlo power analyses and intensive hierarchical regression analyses specifically for ICTs; pioneered applications of ICTs for a range of clinical outcomes (e.g., transplants, depression, diabetes, power seats for persons with paraplegia); developed statistical modeling for ICT biosensor data; adapted intensive hierarchical regression for non-Gaussian outcomes; and developed N=1 statistical analytics to yield study results to benefit the individuals who participate in clinical trials.