Richard A. Brown, Ph.D.

Biography

Dr. Richard A. Brown received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Oregon in 1981, following completion of internship in clinical psychology at Brown Medical School. He held a faculty position at the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University, prior to returning to Brown University. During the 25 years prior to moving to UT Austin, he was in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University, for most of that time as Full Professor and Director of Addictions Research at Butler Hospital.

Dr. Brown has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a Principal Investigator (PI) since 1992, having received 18 NIH- and 2 American Cancer Society-funded grants as PI, totaling $24 million dollars, including NIH funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). He has also served as Co-PI or Co-Investigator on 24 NIH-funded grants, totaling another $35 million dollars. Dr. Brown has published over 180 scientific journal articles, books and book chapters.

Dr. Brown has been elected as a Fellow to the Society for Behavioral Medicine and as a Fellow to the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco.  He is currently serving on the Editorial Board of Contemporary Clinical Trials. He has served on a number of NIH study sections, including the NIDA-K Training and Career Development Review Committee of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the RPIA-N, Risk, Prevention and Intervention for Addictions Study Section. Dr. Brown has also served as Chair of the NHLBI Special Emphasis Study Section (ZHL1 CSR-A S1) “Effectiveness Research on Smoking Cessation in Hospitalized Patients (U01) and as a Distinguished Editor for the Editorial Review Panel for RFA-DA-13-003: Tobacco Centers of Regulatory Science for Research Relevant to the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (P50).

For over 30 years, Dr. Brown’s research has been focused across a variety of areas related to health behavior change, including the development of efficacious tobacco cessation treatments, specialized tobacco cessation treatments for smokers with psychiatric and substance use disorders and for smokers living with HIV, the efficacy of aerobic exercise in the treatment of tobacco and other substance dependence and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and intervention approaches to adult and adolescent alcohol and drug abuse.  Social learning theory has guided much of this work, with primary modalities utilized being cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBT), motivational interviewing (MI) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).  He is currently involved in developing digital and technology-based interventions, often incorporating these modalities.