Susan E. Luczak
Susan E. Luczak received her Sc.B. (honors) in Psychology from Brown University, her M.A. and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from USC, and her post-doctoral training at the University of California, San Diego. Her research program examines etiological factors in the development of alcohol problems and methodological issues in alcohol research. She is currently investigating genetic, biological, cultural, and psychosocial factors that relate to alcohol use in various ethnic groups, including individuals of African, northeast Asian, Indian, and Caucasian descent in the US and on the island of Mauritius. She also has a line of research in collaboration with Co-PI Gary Rosen to use real-time assessment techniques to examine naturalistic drinking patterns and to develop mathematical models and software to convert transdermal alcohol measurement obtained via wearable biosensors into estimates of breath/blood alcohol concentration.
Please look through each of the subpages on this site to learn more about Dr. Luczak’s research and ways of getting involved in the laboratory.
Dr. Luczak’s Current Research
Mauritius Joint Child Health Project
The Joint Child Health Project (JCHP) is conducted on Mauritius, an island nation located in the Indian Ocean. Beginning in the late 1960s, the initial goal of the JCHP was to understand the causes of mental health outcomes, specifically along the schizophrenia spectrum, with the first data collected on 1,795 participants (almost the entire population of 3-year-olds born between 1969 and 1970 in two adjacent towns, Quatre Bornes and Vacoas). Over the years outcomes were expanded to include multiple aspects of health and mental health including cognition, behavior, psycohsocial well-being, and most recently substance use. Currently, Co-International Directors, Drs. Luczak and Adrian Raine, along with the National Director, Tashneem Mahoomed, follow the original birth cohort into their mid 40s and added concurrent assessment of their spouses and children, focusing on risk and protective factors for drinking and smoking among other behaviors. With prospective and retrospective data and a rich battery on the families, we aim to delineate risk and protective factors for alcohol and tobacco involvement in multiple generations of the JCHP families.
Real-Time & Biosensor Alcohol Assessment
Our research team (PIs Susan E. Luczak Ph.D and Gary Rosen Ph.D), over the past decade have conducted research to establish real-time data collection protocols that obtain objective measures of alcohol levels in the body via breath analyzer and transdermal alcohol sensors to produce meaningful quantitative measures of alcohol consumption in naturalistic settings. Our current R01 Research Project Grant now advances the deterministic models we created earlier to include population-based models and machine learning techniques and provides credible bands around our estimates of BrAC.
College Drinking Risk & Protective Factors
Dr. Luczak seeks to better understand underlying mechanisms for the development of alcohol use and problems, particularly in university students. Specifically, she has focused on gene-gene and gene-environment interactions, with particular emphasis on alcohol metabolizing genes that vary across individuals of Asian, Caucasian, Jewish, and African heritage, and the etiology of alcohol involvement via sociocultural risk and protective factors such as cultural, familial, religious, and ethnic group factors.
FLP: Health and Mental Health Research in Mauritius
Located in the island nation Mauritius, this course focuses on health and mental health research programs. Students will learn about research design, existing health and mental health studies and research programs, unique challenges of conducting international research, and ethical considerations in human subjects research. The goal is to help students begin to develop culturally competent research skills, including understanding the environment the research is conducted and contexts which the outcomes should be interpreted.
Graduate Students + Staff
Dr. Luczak will not be taking a graduate student in the clinical sciences program for the 2024 incoming class.
Emily Saldich
Emily Saldich is a Ph.D. student in the Clinical Psychology doctoral program at USC. She is interested in biopsychosocial risk factors for alcohol-related harm and harm reduction strategies. Emily is currently working with data collected by Dr. Luczak to understand how an educational intervention about alcohol-related health risks affects alcohol use trajectories over time in a college student sample. Dr. Luczak is Emily’s primary mentor, and Dr. Christopher Beam is Emily’s clinical mentor.
Fun Facts:
- Hobbies: dance, walking her dog, and biking
- Hogwarts House: Gryffindor
- Favorite Food: Donuts
- Mario Kart Character: Donkey Kong
- She enjoys dying her clothes at the community dye bath.
Kyla-Rose Walden is a Ph.D. student in the Clinical Psychology doctoral program at USC. She works with Dr. Luczak as a primary research mentor and Dr. Gerald Davison as a clinical co-mentor. She conducts research that explores the relationship between identity-related stress and alcohol use in sexual and racial minority populations using real-time assessment paradigms in the laboratory and field.
Fun Facts:
- Hobbies: creating music, making films, playing with her cat, watching horror movies, and playing video games
- Hogwarts House: Slytherin
- Favorite Food: Beans
- Skyrim Build: Spellsword
- She loves A24 films.
Georgia Wong
Georgia Wong has been a Luczak Laboratory member since 2018, starting as a research assistant and eventually becoming a project assistant. She supervises the undergraduate research assistants, manages the lab, and is the unofficial IT person (if the computers or devices aren’t working, hand it to Georgia and she will likely fix it). You can often find her delegating tasks; telling people to “Go”; and/or drawing on the white board, post it note, or piece of paper. All things design and technology was likely done by Georgia.
Fun Facts:
- Hobbies: making jewelry and keychains, crocheting, reading, watching TV, fish keeping
- Hogwarts House: Hufflepuff
- Favorite Food: Noodles
- Mario Kart Character: Toad
- she likes to type in all lowercase.
Joining the Luczak Lab
Interested in joining the Luczak Lab? Dr. Luczak sometimes has available positions for postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students.
Contact Us
Susan E. Luczak Ph.D.
Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences
Department of Psychology
3620 McClintock Ave.
SGM 501
Los Angeles, CA 90089