Donna Spruijt-metz MFA, PhD

Donna Spruijt-Metz, MFA, PhD Director, USC mHealth Collaboratory Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, University of California Donna Spruijt-Metz is Director of the USC mHealth Collaboratory at the University of Southern California’s Center for Economic and Social Research (Co-Director, Bill Swartout), and Professor of Research in Psychology. She also holds a complimentary appointment at the Keck School of Medicine, Department of Preventive Medicine. Her main interests include using mobile technologies to develop data sets that combine sensor and self-report data that is continuous, temporally rich, contextualized. Using this data along with innovative modeling techniques, she wants to develop dynamic, contextualized mathematical models of health-related behavior. She was one of the first to undertake a just-in-time, adaptive intervention (JITAI) in youth, and envisions most or all interventions being JITAI in the future.

Her research focuses on childhood obesity and mobile health technologies, including the KNOWME Networks project, that developed a Wireless Body Area Network system to decrease sedentariness and increase physical activity in overweight minority youth using a JITAI. She is PI of Virtual Sprouts, a virtual, multiplatform gardening game designed to change dietary knowledge and behavior and prevent obesity in minority youth.