Federal Grant Award Summary

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) under its Alcohol Research Programs (CFDA 93.273) awarded a $498,000 Project Grant to The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York on September 25, 2025, with completion targeted for August 31, 2028. This mentored research initiative will develop innovative methodologies to measure stigma associated with women's alcohol use across the lifespan and examine the intergenerational transmission of alcohol-related health behaviors. The research addresses critical knowledge gaps regarding when stigma-related factors are most harmful to women and how these effects impact offspring health outcomes.

The project will deliver a time-varying measure of stigma related to women's alcohol use by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to a corpus of over 9,000 digitized newspapers from all 50 U.S. states spanning 75 years. This analysis will be paired with longitudinal data from two large intergenerational cohort studies: the Nurses' Health Study 2 (N=116,429) and the Growing Up Today Study (N=27,704). The research will elucidate associations between stigma exposure and alcohol use patterns across women's lifecourse while identifying moderating risk and preventive factors that may reduce health consequences for women and their children, ultimately contributing to evidence-based understanding of alcohol-related disparities among women.