Psychology graduate student Haley Hummel researches the association between cannabis policy and substance use among college students.
Haley Hummel
By Ellie Webb-Bowen, CLA Student Writer - November 13, 2024
While growing up in Phoenix, Arizona, majoring in psychology at a collegiate level wasn’t on Haley Hummel’s radar, until she took an introductory class in high school and was hooked. Now, Hummel is a Ph.D. student specializing in health psychology at the School of Psychological Science (SPS) in the College of Liberal Arts.
While an undergraduate psychology student at Arizona State University (ASU), Hummel worked in the Arizona Twin Project, a developmental psychology lab. Hummel contributed to the ongoing longitudinal study by collecting data through home visits, helping to examine genetic and environmental factors contributing to stress, sleep, chronic pain and resilience throughout childhood.
Hummel became interested in substance use research during a presentation given by ASU Associate Professor of Psychology Dr. Madeline Meier. One particularly striking quote about the untapped potential of cannabis use research that has stuck with her is: "Policy has outpaced science". Hummel joined the Substance Use, Health and Behavior Lab led by Dr. Meier, for which she contributed to a study observing short-term effects of cannabis on cognition, emotions, and behavior. In partnership with Dr. Meier and a former Ph.D. student Dr. Connor Jones, she disseminated an ecological momentary assessment study that examined participants’ psychological state before and after medical cannabis use. The results showed medical cannabis use was predicted by pain and appeared to provide acute pain reduction. However, medical users also experienced adverse effects, including withdrawal and craving, which are risk factors for cannabis use disorder. The role of withdrawal and craving in motivating medical cannabis use has the potential to inform patients, physicians, and policymakers on making evidence-based decisions regarding medical cannabis.
“Working on the Arizona Twin Project and with Dr. Meier as an undergraduate was formative for my future research agenda,” said Hummel. “Not only did this give me hands-on experience in data collection and formative mentorship by strong women in psychology, but it also allowed me to engage with novel data to complete an undergraduate honors thesis, which prepared me for graduate-level research and helped me realize my interest in health behaviors and outcomes.”
In addition to receiving her B.S. from ASU, as well as the Dean’s Medal award, Hummel also received a B.A. in global health and a minor in Spanish, setting her up for interdisciplinary work at the intersection of psychology, public policy, and public health. This prompted her to look at attending OSU for graduate school.
Hummel sought to continue studying substance use in young adults in a research-based Ph.D. program adjacent to clinical psychology, public health, and developmental psychology. She discovered this fit in a health psychology specialization at OSU. The program’s support for interdisciplinary and strong statistical training, a healthy work-life balance, and a collaborative, rather than competitive, environment among grad students and faculty was what she was looking for. Coming into her first year in her combined master’s and Ph.D. program, Hummel received the Provost’s Distinguished Graduate Scholarship. She was drawn to the work of Dr. David Kerr, whom she met with prior to deciding to attend OSU.
“He has significantly influenced my positive experience here at OSU,” said Hummel. “He is supportive, present, and committed, and always has my and other grad students’ best interests at heart.”
Now in her second year as a part of Dr. Kerr’s Youth Adjustment Lab, Hummel is currently focused on how policy may affect health outcomes, and hopes to expand to how policy may inform disparities in these health outcomes. More specifically, her master’s thesis examines a novel measure of how restrictive cannabis policies are in different states, and how state policy restrictiveness may affect the odds of college students' binge drinking, cannabis use, and co-use of cannabis and alcohol. She is involved in other policy-related projects such as an investigation of Oregon adults’ cannabis use and binge drinking in relation to retail cannabis environments, a recent publication that examines 2016–2021 trends in Arizona cannabis-related hospital visits and their associations with mental-health related hospital visits, and a study of how substance policies on college campuses may be measured.
“These are relatively-untapped areas of public health and psychology—while policies are abstract, the concrete environment they create for people to live in definitely trickles down to individual behaviors,” Hummel explained.
In addition to her research, Hummel teaches Introduction to Psychology II (PSY 202Z), and also mentors the undergraduate students in the Youth Adjustment Lab, which has been one of her favorite parts of being a graduate student in SPS.
“It’s been awesome,” said Hummel. “Our team is very dedicated and inquisitive, which makes for a positive environment to explore these questions. Productive mentorship was essential for me getting to where I am today, and so being able to give that back to other people is so rewarding.”
This past summer, Hummel worked for the Department of Homeland Security in partnership with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington. She was drawn to the internship because of its focus on causal inference, a technique which can contribute to policy analysis. Though her duties involved less psychology and more data science, Hummel is grateful to bring back new skills and apply them to the Youth Adjustment Lab.
“Writing and documenting algorithms for open source code, including in Python and R, may not seem directly applicable to health psychology,” Hummel explained. “However, this technical knowledge and training are tools I can use to ask and answer more complex research questions, and share with students to strengthen their skillsets.”