Sabrina Oesterle is Associate Professor in the School of Social Work and Director of the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions.

Dr. Oesterle is a prevention scientist with a focus on life course research and the prevention of behavioral health problems among adolescents and young adults.

She has expertise in longitudinal and experimental study designs and advanced quantitative methods of data analysis, including latent class analysis, structural equation modeling, growth and growth mixture modeling, multilevel modeling, missing data approaches, and psychometric measurement.

Dr. Oesterle is currently the Principal Investigator (PI) of the long-term follow-up of the community-randomized trial of the Communities That Care (CTC) prevention system (5R01DA044522). The study examines how the interplay of social, normative, and legal contexts defines individuals’ marijuana environments from late childhood through young adulthood (age 11 to 28) and how these multi-contextual marijuana environments increase marijuana and other drug use and misuse. The study also tests long-term effects of CTC on marijuana and alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use and misuse in the mid- and late 20s in the context of changing marijuana environments.