- Assistant Professor
- Department of Psychology; Clinical Psychology
- Phone: 401.874.4240
- Email: hlopez-vergara@uri.edu
- Accepting Students: Not at this time
Research
PLEASE NOTE: Dr. Lopez-Vergara will not be accepting new graduate students for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Dr. Lopez-Vergara’s program of research seeks to “unpack” specific dysregulatory risk factors for psychopathology and substance use, with an emphasis on executive functioning, reinforcement sensitivity, and memory processes. His program of research is currently funded by a Career Development Award (K08) from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), and by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), which funds the Advance Clinical and Translational Research (Advance-CTR) pilot projects program. The research funded by these grants will test the psychometric properties of commonly used performance-based measures of cognition and motivation. Reliably “unpacking” phenotypic heterogeneity of psychopathology has the potential to increase experimental precision and advance our current mental health classification system, and hence is a necessary step in developing personalized medicine approaches that seek to build upon existing levels of treatment outcome efficacy.
Additional Research Interests
Dr. Lopez-Vergara is also interested in social determinants of health, specifically on the need to explicitly test for equivalent instrument functioning (e.g., measurement invariance) when making inferences across historically underrepresented groups in science.
Laboratory
In the fall of 2020, Dr. Lopez-Vergara launched the Investigating Mechanisms in Adjustment and Psychopathology (iMap) lab. Students interested in joining the lab should email Dr. Lopez-Vergara a letter of interest and your Curriculum Vitae. Website coming soon.
Education
- Ph.D. 2014, University at Buffalo
- M.S. 2010, University at Buffalo
- B.A. 2007, University of Texas at El Paso
Selected Publications
Lopez-Vergara, H.I., Zapolski, T.C.B., & Leventhal, A.M. (in press). Intersection of minority health, health disparities, and social determinants of health with psychopharmacology and substance use. Experimental & Clinical Psychopharmacology.
Lopez-Vergara, H. I., Yang, M., Weiss, N. H., Stamates, A. L., Spillane, N. S., & Feldstein Ewing, S. W. (2021). The cultural equivalence of measurement in substance use research. Experimental & Clinical Psychopharmacology, Advance online publication.
Lopez-Vergara, H. I., Rosales, R., Scheuermann, T., Nollen, N., Leventhal, A., & Ahluwalia, J. (2020). Social determinants of alcohol and cigarette use by race/ethnicity: Can we ignore measurement issues? Psychological Assessment, 32, 1075-1086.
Lopez-Vergara, H. I., Jackson, K. M., Meshesha, L. Z., & Metrik, J. (2019). Dysregulation as a correlate of cannabis use and problem use. Addictive Behaviors, 95, 138-144.
Lopez-Vergara, H. I., Merrill, J. E., & Carey, K. B. (2018). Testing variability in response to a brief alcohol intervention: The role of self-regulation and the therapeutic relationship. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 32, 205-212.
Lopez-Vergara, H. I., Merrill, J. E., Janssen, T., & Jackson, K. M. (2017). Social and individual-level predictors of alcohol use initiation and escalation: Replicating and extending tests of differential effects. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 78, 452-457.
Lopez-Vergara, H. I., Spillane, N. S., Merrill, & Jackson, K. M. (2016). Developmental trends in alcohol use initiation and escalation from early to middle adolescence: Prediction by urgency and trait affect. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 30, 578-587.
Vergara-Lopez, C., Lopez-Vergara, H. I., & Roberts, J. E. (2016). Testing a “content meets process” model of depression vulnerability and rumination: Exploring the moderating role of set-shifting deficits. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 50, 201-208.
Lopez-Vergara, H. I., & Colder, C. R. (2013). An examination of the specificity of motivation and executive functioning in ADHD symptom-clusters in adolescence. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 38, 1081-1090.
Vergara-Lopez, C., Lopez-Vergara, H. I., & Colder, C. R. (2013). Executive functioning moderates the association between motivation and adolescent depressive symptoms. Personality and Individual Differences, 54, 18-22.
Lopez-Vergara, H. I., Colder, C. R., Hawk, L. W., Wieczorek, W. F., Eiden, R. D., Lengua, L. J., & Read, J. P. (2012). Reinforcement sensitivity theory and alcohol outcome expectancies in early adolescence. The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 38, 130-134.
O’Connor, R. M., Lopez-Vergara, H. I., & Colder, C. R. (2012). Implicit cognition and substance use: The role of controlled and automatic processes in children. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 73, 134-143.
Honors and Awards
| Year | |
|---|---|
| 2015 - 2022 | National Institutes of Health (NIH) Loan Repayment Program Awardee x4 |
| 2015; 2016 | Research Society on Alcoholism Junior Investigator Award x2 |
| 2013 | Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology minority fellowship to attend the University of Kansas CRMDA Summer Institute in Statistics |
| 2012 - 2014 | Post 9/11 G.I. Bill for graduate study |
| 2009 - 2011 | NIDA Diversity Supplement for “Motivation in Context: Risk for Early Substance Use” parent project R01 DA020171 |
| 2007 - 2011 | SUNY – Buffalo Arthur A. Schomburg Fellowship |
| 2005 - 2007 | National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Career Opportunities in Research Education & Training (T34) Honors Undergraduate Research Training Fellowship |
| 2003 - 2007 | Montgomery G.I. Bill for undergraduate study |