By Jill Pease

The magazine Psychology Today featured two studies from research teams led by Linda B. Cottler, Ph.D., M.P.H., FACE, among the top articles on addiction research in 2024.
“We are very happy to know our work is making an impact,” said Cottler, a professor of epidemiology in the University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions and College of Medicine and director of the National Drug Early Warning System Coordinating Center at UF, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The team’s article, “Public health surveillance of new psychoactive substances: recent developments,” which appeared in the journal Current Opinion in Psychiatry, was listed among Psychology Today’s Top 10 Addiction Research Articles of 2024. Psychology Today writer Mark Gold, M.D., selected articles based on the novelty of the findings, their unique utility and their focus on critical gaps in addiction understanding and care.
Nicole Fitzgerald, Ph.D., a graduate of the UF Ph.D. program in epidemiology and a former trainee with the T32 NIDA Substance Abuse Training Center in Public Health, served as the paper’s lead author along with Cottler and Joseph Palamar, Ph.D., an associate professor at New York University. Their article discusses surveillance approaches for emerging psychoactive substances, including the drug xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer that is being added to supplies of some illicit drugs, including fentanyl. Fitzgerald is now a postdoctoral fellow in the Columbia University NIDA T32 training program.
In a second Psychology Today article, Top Findings on Addiction in 2024, Gold highlights 10 articles published last year that offer insights into understanding and treating addiction. The list features an article that appeared in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence by Fitzgerald, Cottler and fellow UF researchers Yiyang Liu, Ph.D., Anna Wang, Ph.D., Catherine Striley, Ph.D., Barry Setlow, Ph.D., and Lori Knackstedt, Ph.D., that explores polysubstance use, or the practice of using multiple psychoactive substances at one time.
Their study “Sequencing hour-level temporal patterns of polysubstance use among persons who use cocaine, alcohol, and cannabis: A back-translational approach” identified five distinct patterns of cocaine polysubstance use, characterized by timing, order and duration of use.
“The identification of real-world patterns of cocaine polysubstance use represents an important step toward developing laboratory models that accurately reflect human behavior,” the authors write.