Speaker Bio – May 14 meeting of the Committee on Prevention of Mental Disorders and Substance Abuse Among Children, Youth, and Young Adults

DAN HOYT, Ph.D. is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has been engaged in basic and prevention research on mental health and substance abuse among adolescents over the past 17 years. In the early 1990’s he was a co-investigator, and Director of Survey Operations, for the NIMH funded Center for Family Research in Rural Mental Health at Iowa State University. Over the subsequent years he has been co-investigator on NIMH funded studies of mental health outcomes for homeless and runaway youth and NIDA and SAMSHA funded studies of culturally based prevention programs for American Indian adolescents. He also spent five years consulting for the USDA on community based intervention research in the rural Mississippi Delta. His current research activities include co-investigator roles on NIMH and NIDA supported longitudinal studies of mental health and substance use among American Indian and Canadian First Nations adolescents and pilot research on culturally based substance use prevention among rural Latino immigrants. As a member of the American Sociological Association he is active in the section on Mental Health and the section on Alcohol, Drugs and Tobacco.