# Collaborator-designed agent-based models to inform alcohol-involved sexual violence prevention on college campuses.

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH AT PITTSBURGH · 2024 · $473,374

## Abstract

PROJECT ABSTRACT
Despite increased attention over the past decade, alcohol-involved sexual violence continues to be widespread
on college campuses. Existing interventions, which include bystander training, education programs, and brief
interventions, take an essentially global approach to the prevention of harmful alcohol use and sexual violence,
and largely neglect the social and situational contexts in which drinking occurs. A combination of campus
policies, behavioral interventions, and community-level interventions are likely needed to address this complex
problem. Alcohol-involved sexual violence can be conceptualized as a system with feedback loops between
various individual-level behaviors as well as between contexts and behaviors. Agent-based models (ABMs) are
a methodological tool that can incorporate dynamics between behavioral, social, and structural environments
and their impacts on hazardous alcohol use and sexual violence. They can be used to simulate the
implementation of intervention(s) across a wide range of college campuses and populations. The usefulness of
a given ABM, however, is limited by its accuracy, focus, and salience to end users. A stakeholder-engaged
model-building process greatly enhances the relevance and usefulness of models that explicitly account for
dynamic processes. The overall goal of this proposal is to create a stakeholder-designed ABM that can serve
as a decision support tool to help campuses reduce alcohol-involved sexual violence among students. To
achieve this goal, we will first develop a stakeholder-designed systems model of hazardous drinking, SV, and
intervention opportunities on college campuses through a series of stakeholder-engaged model building
sessions guided by a Core Modeling Team (Aim 1). We will leverage a learning collaborative of campus
stakeholders including students, practitioners from health and counseling centers, Title IX coordinators,
residential counselors, and so forth, from an ongoing alcohol-involved SV RCT involving 28 college campuses
in Pennsylvania and West Virginia to recruit 60 student and non-student stakeholder experts to 6 stakeholder
model building groups. The integrated systems model will be then translated into an ABM of alcohol use and
sexual violence using an ABM platform with realistic synthetic populations that provides a population
foundation for community-based simulations (The Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiologic Dynamics
(FRED)) (Aim 2). We will then develop and assess the preliminary feasibility of stakeholder-informed, ABM-
based decision support tools to optimize campus interventions to reduce alcohol-involved sexual violence
(Exploratory Aim 3). This innovative, empirically-based approach, using stakeholder-engaged modeling to
design an ABM and ABM-based decision support tools, can guide campus-level policy and programmatic
changes, leading to improved implementation of effective strategies to address alcohol-involved sexual
violence, promote pre...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10880435
- **Project number:** 5R01AA029379-03
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH AT PITTSBURGH
- **Principal Investigator:** Christina Furber Mair
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $473,374
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2022-09-20 → 2027-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10880435

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10880435, Collaborator-designed agent-based models to inform alcohol-involved sexual violence prevention on college campuses. (5R01AA029379-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10880435. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*