Postdoctoral Trainees


woman smiling with blond hair

Amanda Collins, PhD

PhD in Clinical Psychology from Mississippi State University, 2023

Research interests
Dr. Amanda Collins is a T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Dartmouth College and the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health working with Dr. Nick Jacobson. She received her PhD in clinical psychology from Mississippi State University in 2023 under the mentorship of E. Samuel Winer. Her research focuses on reward dysfunction as a transdiagnostic mechanism underlying the etiology and maintenance of psychopathology, including depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. The two areas of her research focus on: (1) the application of advanced statistical methods to predict changes in psychopathology and (2) the development and testing of both in-person and digital interventions. Moreover, she is particularly interested in bridging these two areas of research by using advanced methods to understand what interventions work best and for whom, with the overall goal of developing more personalized interventions to treat reward dysfunction transdiagnostically. Dr. Collins utilizes a multimodal approach, including self-reports, experimental paradigms, ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) and passive sensing, to investigate the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of psychopathology. She also has extensive experience with longitudinal data analysis, including multilevel and time-varying vector autoregressive modeling, mixed-effects modeling, and machine learning to investigate how reward dysfunction changes over time and influences the course, severity, and treatment of psychopathology.


woman long dark hair smiling

Deepika Rao, PhD, MS, BPharm

PhD in Health Services Research in Pharmacy, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2022

Research interests
I hold a Bachelor of Pharmacy (2016) from University of Mumbai, India and a Master’s degree in Pharmacy Administration (2018) from Duquesne University, Pittsburgh. My Master’s thesis was titled ‘Community Pharmacists and Substance Use Disorders: Attitudes, Knowledge and Practices’. I received my PhD in Health Services Research in Pharmacy (2022) from UW-Madison. My doctoral dissertation involved exploring and developing a patient-centered screening and brief intervention for opioid misuse for pharmacy settings. I am particularly interested in studying the application of mixed methods and dissemination and implementation sciences, especially in the prevention and treatment of substance use disorders. In my spare time, I enjoy reading and exploring different craft hobbies.


Samuel Stull, PhD

PhD in Biobehavioral Health, Penn State University, 2024

Research interests
Dr. Samuel W. Stull is a T32 postdoctoral research fellow in the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health at Dartmouth College. He received his PhD in Biobehavioral Health (emphasis in applied statistics) from Penn State University working under the mentorship of Dr. Stephanie Lanza. As a PhD student, Dr. Stull was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a NIDA NRSA F31 Predoctoral Fellowship. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a post-baccalaureate fellow at the NIDA Intramural Research Program under the mentorship of Drs. Kenzie Preston and David Epstein. Dr. Stull’s research is focused on the role of positive moods states and nondrug rewards in supporting recovery from addiction on a daily basis. Integrated in his work is often the use of innovative methods to delineate dynamic and heterogenous daily processes (e.g., time-varying effect modeling, multilevel latent class analysis). As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Stull will work under the mentorship of Drs. Lisa Marsch and Nicholas Jacobson to learn key theoretical (i.e. science of behavior change) and methodological approaches (i.e. adaptive interventions, micro-randomized trials) for developing digital interventions. Dr. Stull’s focus will include the development of a novel humor-based digital intervention to promote greater treatment engagement, enjoyment, and adaptive coping strategies to support recovery from addiction.