Rivera-Mariani and Sperry awarded grant towards stress biomarker research

Description

Félix Rivera-Mariani, associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and Jon Sperry, professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, were awarded a RayBiotech Innovative Research Grant (in the form of store credits) for the project titled "Immediate Effects of Therapeutic Group Drumming on Affective States and Multimodal Stress Biomarkers in College Students." This project, in which Rivera-Mariani serves as the principal investigator and Sperry as the co-investigator, was selected among over 80 submissions nationwide.  

The project builds on earlier iterations led by College of Arts and Sciences faculty: Assistant Dean and Associate Professor Alanna Lecher, Associate Professor Cassandra Korte and Sperry. It is now expanding into system-wide biomarker discovery (one biomarker per human organ system) and integrating machine learning to analyze coordinated changes in psychological and physiological responses to music stimuli. 

Using biomarker assays from RayBiotech, the study will measure stress-related biomarkers and autonomic indicators before and after therapeutic group drumming. The data will be used to identify distance response phenotypes, with the goal of informing scalable, non-pharmacologic interventions to reduce stress in college populations.