Xiangyu Tao, Ph.D.

I am a Postdoctoral Associate at the Rutgers Addiction Research Center (Department of Psychiatry, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School), working with Dr. Kristina M. Jackson. I received my Ph.D. in Applied Developmental Psychology from Fordham University.

My research sits at the intersection of adolescent and young adult substance use, digital media and online communities, intensive longitudinal and person-centered methods, and AI and natural language processing for behavioral health.

You can find my work on Google Scholar and ORCID, or reach me by email below.

Current research

#THREADS · Tracking How Recovery Emerges Across Digital Support

I direct #THREADS, my NIDA-funded K99/R00 project (“Integrating AI and Co-production to Analyze Communications in Social Media Substance Use Recovery Groups”).

Fewer than a quarter of U.S. adults with substance use disorder receive treatment, and many turn instead to online recovery communities such as r/stopdrinking. Paradoxically, heavier involvement in these communities has been linked to higher relapse risk, which raises the question at the heart of #THREADS: what is actually being said in them? A key distinction the project draws is between genuine peer support and co-rumination (repetitively rehashing and dwelling on distress together), two patterns that look alike on the surface but may have opposite consequences for recovery.

To answer this at scale, I am analyzing a corpus of roughly 1.4 million comments and 54,000 posts from eight recovery subreddits, using large language models validated against human-coded gold-standard data. The work is guided by co-production: a community advisory board of people with lived recovery experience (VOICES) helps shape the codebook, interpret findings, and keep the analysis grounded in real recovery. In the R00 phase, I will follow recovery-subreddit users longitudinally to test how their communication profiles predict recovery outcomes over time. (NIH RePORTER · Rutgers BHI announcement)

Alongside #THREADS, I study day-to-day links between online contexts and alcohol and other substance use in young adults using intensive longitudinal data. My doctoral work, with Dr. Celia B. Fisher at Fordham, examined how online racial discrimination and digital coping shape mental health and substance use among youth of color.

Team

I am fortunate to work with two research assistants on #THREADS and related projects:

Elena Chauhan, Research Assistant. “I am a Master’s of Social Work Student at the Ohio State University and a Research Assistant at the Rutgers Addiction Research Center. My areas of interest in research include examining peer support for substance use recovery and highlighting lived experiences of communities with substance misuse and mental illness to combat stigma and improve treatment. I feel grateful to be part of #THREADS and better understand online recovery spaces which can be a valuable tool.”
Thomas Haber, Research Assistant. Thomas is a recent graduate from Rutgers University. His research focuses on how interpersonal interactions and stereotypes can exacerbate the disparities that people with disabilities face. He is also interested in interventions that alleviate said disparities, which include community support programs.

Xiangyu Tao, Ph.D.

Current research

Team

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