Columbia Roybal Center
About Us
Most adults will experience a serious medical event, such as a heart attack, stroke, or cancer diagnosis, at some point in their lifetimes. Our research has shown that the distress that arises from these events leads many patients to develop a heightened fear of having recurrent events. For many of these patients, this fear can lead patients to avoid the very health behaviors that reduce their risk. Accordingly, our Columbia Roybal Center applies the experimental medicine approach to test scalable and impactful interventions to prevent or address these fear-based mechanisms. We have several trials underway.
In 2019, Dr. Ian Kronish and Dr. Donald Edmondson were awarded funding from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to create the Columbia Roybal Center for Fearless Behavioral Change. One of 13 Roybal Centers nationally, the goal of this Center was to develop, test, and disseminate behavior change interventions that improve health behaviors after acute medical events that are common in aging populations.
In 2024, Dr. Ian Kronish and Dr. Nathalie Moise were awarded funding from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to renew the Columbia Roybal Center for Fearless Behavior Change. Building upon its first iteration, this Center is dedicated to advancing behavioral interventions that reduce psychological distress and improve health behaviors in patients who have experienced serious health events, with the ultimate goal of advancing behavioral interventions with the potential to be routinely implemented in clinical practice.
Our Mission
The Columbia Roybal Center aims to improve the well-being and prognosis of diverse mid-life and older adults who experience serious health events such as heart attacks, strokes, and cancer diagnoses. We do this by testing and advancing interventions that reduce psychological distress and improve health behaviors that are important to recovery. Our Center is comprised of a multidisciplinary team of highly collaborative patient and family stakeholders whose invaluable lived experience and insights directly informs our research, as well as scientists with expertise in disciplines including behavioral medicine, cardiology, primary care, clinical psychology, exercise physiology, and biostatistics, among others. We maintain a world-class research infrastructure experienced in recruiting and tracking patients who have experienced serious health events. We actively seek to enlist diverse investigators in our mission, and provide scientific, methodological, regulatory, and statistical support to their projects. We follow the NIH Stage Model and the experimental behavioral mechanism-driven approach when developing our interventions. Our Center receives strategic guidance from an advisory board of equal partners that includes health system and scientific leaders in the field of behavioral medicine as well as patient and family stakeholders.
Our Services
Consultations on Behavioral Trials: Our Center is available to provide advice on the design, grant writing, and implementation of behavioral trials. We also provide expertise on the mechanism-driven approach to behavioral intervention development promoted by the NIH’s Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) initiative. This involves testing the effect of an intervention not only on the target health behavior (e.g., medication adherence or physical activity), but also on the proximal mechanism that explains how the intervention works (e.g., reducing fear of recurrent cardiovascular events).
Implementation Science Consultations: Our affiliated ImSci Lab is available for advice on incorporating implementation methods and designing interventions for eventual implementation.
To learn more about SOBC, click here.