Our Program

The Midwest Alcoholism Research Center (MARC) has grown out of inter-linked research collaborations among alcoholism researchers at Washington University School of Medicine (lead institution), the University of Iowa, the University of Missouri-Columbia, the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Medical Center, Arizona State University, and Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Australia.

The broad focus of the research program of the MARC concerns the etiology and course of alcohol problems and associated comorbidity in community samples of adolescents and youth.  Center-wide research themes involve testing three classes of mediational models for alcoholism risk: (a) pharmacological vulnerability; (b) negative affect-regulation; (c) deviance proneness- in a series of prospective behavioral genetic and family studies, as well as laboratory-based studies.