Rebecca Ashare, PhD

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. I received my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo and completed my predoctoral clinical fellowship at the Yale University School of Medicine Division of Substance Abuse. I joined the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Nicotine Addiction (CIRNA) at UPenn as a postdoctoral fellow and was appointed to faculty in 2012. At CIRNA, I continued my research identifying novel therapeutic targets that underlie smoking relapse and evaluating novel treatments to improve abstinence rates, with a particular focus on neurocognition. 

My research takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding substance use among individuals with medical and psychiatric comorbidities. Most recently, this work has focused on three areas: (1) the mechanisms and outcomes of tobacco use among people with HIV (PWH); (2) digital interventions for smoking cessation among individuals with serious mental illness; and (3) the intersection of cannabis and opioid use for symptom management.

My work in tobacco use and HIV evaluates the mechanisms and outcomes of tobacco use among PWH, a population with disproportionately high smoking rates. Coupled with the widespread use of antiretroviral therap, PWH actually lose more life years to tobacco use than to HIV. My research projects seek to understand: (1) the mechanisms that underlie high smoking rates; (2) why existing treatments are less effective and relapse rates are higher among PWH; and (3) how HIV and smoking my act syngergistically and ultimately lead to worse clinical outcomes including cancer and impaired immune function.

I am also collaborating with investigators at Duke University on a multi-site clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness of a mobile health application (i.e., smartphone app) for smoking cessation among individuals with serious mental illness. We are collaborating with outpatient psychiatry clinics at Erie County medical Center on this trial.

We also recently began a study to better understand cannabis use in the context of cancer. Specifically, we are studying whether cannabis may help to reduce opioid use for managing pain among cancer patients. This study is a collaboration with Roswell Park Cancer Institute, the University of Pennsylvania and Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center.