Susan L. Ames, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
She has taught courses in Research Methods, Issues in the Cessation and Prevention of Substance Abuse, and Theoretical Foundations in Health Promotion and Education. She worked in substance abuse treatment for nearly a decade, and co-authored two books on concepts in the etiology, prevention and cessation of substance abuse. Her research interested include dual process models of addictive behaviors, neurobiological systems and brain structures associated with implicit and control processes, etiology of habits, and new prevention and risk reduction strategies for addictive behaviors.
Susan L. Ames received her Ph.D. in preventive medicine with a focus on health behavior research from the University of Southern California in 2001. She completed her doctoral training with support from an NCI Cancer Control and Epidemiology Research Training Grant. After completing her doctorate, she was an assistant research psychologist at the Center for Research on Substance Abuse, Department of Psychology, UCLA, and co-investigator on an Implicit Cognition and HIV risk project. Dr. Ames subsequently became faculty at USC where she was an assistant professor with the Transdisciplinary Drug Abuse Prevention Research Center (TPRC), Department of Preventive Medicine, USC. She has been co-investigator on several substance abuse prevention projects funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Currently, she is PI on a NIDA-funded project that involves imaging (fMRI) the neural substrates of implicit marijuana associations during performance on indirect tests of associations. She is co-investigator (Stacy, PI) on another NIDA-funded project investigating implicit and control processes in HIV-risk behavior among drug offenders. Her work focuses on the transdisciplinary area of associative memory. This area integrates research from neuroscience, memory, social cognition, learning, and decision theory to explain how drug use (and other risk behavior) habits begin and are perpetuated.
Education
- University of Southern California, PhD, 2001
- California State University Los Angeles, M.A., 1994
Selected Publications
2011 Claremont Graduate University 
School of Community & Global Health 