Dr. Gex received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology (B.S.) from the College of Charleston, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Memphis, in Memphis, TN. She returned to Charleston to complete here predoctoral internship and postdoctoral training (NIDA T32) at the Medical University of South Carolina. Dr. Gex joined the Addiction Sciences Division faculty in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences upon completion of her postdoctoral fellowship. She is a previous recipient of a NIDA K12 Career Development Award and a current awardee of a NIDA K23 Career Development Award.
Her research focuses on improving the efficacy of brief interventions for substance use prevention and early intervention to reduce substance use related harms and the risk of developing substance use disorders (SUDs), and to improve overall health outcomes across the lifespan. She is especially interested in understanding behavioral and intervention mechanisms that lead to increased motivation for behavior change among individuals who use cannabis. To this end, her work has incorporated qualitative and mixed methods to probe for candidate behavior change mechanisms specific to cannabis to inform the development of novel brief intervention targets to reduce problematic cannabis use.
Dr. Gex is also interested in sex/gender and age-related factors associated with cannabis use, such as motives and perceived severity of consequences, that may be leveraged to inform tailored brief interventions. She was awarded pilot funds from MUSC’s Specialized Center of Research Excellence (SCORE) on Sex and Gender Differences in Cannabis and Stress to explore these and other potential factors in a cross-sectional survey of over 300 community-dwelling adults who regularly use cannabis.
Dr. Gex has training and experience in the application of behavioral economic theory to understanding substance use and addiction. Her current work also continues to explore behavioral economic indices as they relate to better understanding substance use across the lifespan and improving the efficacy of brief interventions for preventing problematic substance use.