The Center for Opioid Epidemiology and Policy provides several pilot project awards to support emerging research from early career investigators at NYU Langone and the broader NYU research community. The application for funding is currently closed. Please sign up for our mailing list to receive updates about our grant program.

Recent Pilot Project Awardees

Our 2023 and 2024 Policy Pilot Project Grant Program focused on social determinants of the overdose crisis and social inequalities in the experience of the overdose crisis, its drivers, and potential solutions. The program had a particular interest in work investigating racial and ethnic disparities in the risk of opioid misuse and overdose.

Assessing Overdose Risk and Protective Factors Among People Who Inject Drugs in Puerto Rico

This one-year study will examine risk and protective factors for opioid-related overdoses among people who inject drugs (PWID) in Puerto Rico. While overdoses are common among PWID, little information exists on opioid overdose prevention and response strategies in Puerto Rico. This study seeks to contribute foundational knowledge about overdose experiences in Puerto Rico and will assess multi-level factors contributing to overdoses, as well as barriers to and facilitators of overdose prevention resources. We will interview 30 PWID and 20 community stakeholders to explore their perspectives on what drives increases in overdose and potential solutions to reduce overdose death among Puerto Rican PWID. Community stakeholders include public health professionals, syringe services providers, shooting gallery managers, and gancheros (hit doctors). The study will employ a qualitative approach that is particularly well-suited as it can better uncover multiple factors contributing to overdoses and inform the development and tailoring of overdose prevention interventions for PWID. We are proposing this study as a first step toward developing an intervention to reduce overdose fatalities among PWID in Puerto Rico.

Principal investigator: Yesenia Aponte-Meléndez is a postdoctoral fellow at NYU Behavioral Science Training in Drug Abuse Research Program and an early-stage investigator at CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. Her research areas include substance use, HIV, HCV, women and prescription opioids use, and mHealth. She has worked on multiple NIH/NIDA mixed methods studies on substance use, HIV/HCV, and technology-based interventions for people who use drugs.

Effects of State-Level Eviction-Limiting Policies on Overdose Mortality in the US, 1999–2015

Rising rates of eviction and other forms of housing insecurity in the last several decades are hypothesized underlying drivers of the overdose epidemic and especially its racially inequitable impacts, yet the policy response to the epidemic has primarily focused downstream. There is a dearth of research on the effects of housing policies on overdoses, limiting the ability to implement evidence-based policy in this area. Over the course of the 2000s and 2010s, U.S. states experimented with several eviction-limited policies, including disallowing evictions processed in small claims court (as opposed to regular state court) and prohibiting landlord retaliation in response to a tenant pre-emptively resisting eviction. We propose to evaluate effects of these two policies on overdose deaths, overall and by race, ethnicity, and type of substance (opioid vs. stimulant) involved. We will use CDC vital statistics data on overdose deaths, along with novel difference-in-differences estimators developed by the principal investigator, which can properly adjust for time-varying covariates possibly affected by earlier exposure (one likely such covariate in this setting is state-level eviction rates). As pandemic-era eviction protection policies expire or are rolled back, eviction rates have increased, and governments are increasingly considering eviction-limiting legislation. Thus, the proposed research has the potential to support advocacy efforts and inform evidence-based decisions in this area.

Audrey Renson, MPH, PhD, is an assistant professor of epidemiology in NYU Langone’s Department of Population Health. She is 100 percent funded by Beyond Bridges, a multisectoral partnership to develop a community-clinical linkage model to improve population health and health equity in Brooklyn. Her work in Beyond Bridges involves evaluating the causal effects of community health worker interventions and other efforts to address the social determinants of health within healthcare. Her research also involves developing new causal inference methods at the intersection of econometrics and epidemiology, and applying these approaches to estimating effects of social policies on population health and health equity. Prior to joining NYU Langone, Dr. Renson completed her PhD in epidemiology (minor in biostatistics) at UNC-Chapel Hill, where her dissertation focused on advancing difference-in-differences methods and estimating effects of minimum wages on racial inequities in cardiovascular disease.

Following the Power: Social Class Relations as Structural Determinants of Inequities in Opioid Overdose Mortality

Socioeconomic and racial health inequities in the US are vast, with sinking life expectancy fueled by excess opioid overdose mortality among poor and racially minoritized people. Hazardous working conditions propel inequities in the outcome. Underused relational theories suggest such hazards flow from structural power imbalances between workers and employers. Because profits relate inversely to labor costs and positively to labor effort, employers are motivated to cut costs and boost productivity, feasible if workers lack countervailing power. Thus, employers’ wellbeing may come at workers’ expense, and disempowerment threatens worker health. Sinking union density and surging income inequality suggest power has tipped away from workers, who are most of the workforce and largely women and Black people. Thus, worsening inequities and population health, including surging opioid overdose mortality, may reflect changing class power dynamics. However, no US-based epidemiologic studies have applied relational theories to investigate the topic. Using the Mortality Disparities in American Communities dataset, we will address this gap by: 1) quantifying the magnitude of social-class inequities in opioid overdose mortality; 2) identifying how the inequities vary by race/ethnicity, gender, and education; and 3) analyzing if the inequities can be explained by disparate class distributions of sociodemographic factors. Jerzy Eisenberg-Guyot, PhD, MPH, is a Research Scientist in the Division of Epidemiology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine researching the political economy of health. In his dissertation, he analyzed how declining labor union density in the US over the last several decades has contributed to classed, gendered, and racialized health inequities. His current research integrates advanced epidemiologic methods and relational social theories to investigate the effects of novel social factors, like economic exploitation, on inequities in mental illness, mortality, and other outcomes.

Contact Us

For all inquiries, please contact Caroline Barnes, MPH, senior program manager, at Caroline.Barnes@NYULangone.org.