Undergraduate Research & Scholarships

Rebecca Forbes Social Science

Exploring Opiate Abuse in Rural Communities

Current Bio: Since graduation, Rebecca has been working in Research Administration for the UC system. Through this job, she has been able to assist many UC professors and researchers in securing grants and contacts funding for a variety of research projects.
Haas Scholars Project: Rebecca grew up in a small town and watched the rural drug scourge destroy the young lives in her community. Now, she is using her Berkeley education to understand this phenomenon. This summer she will be traveling to rural Tuolumne County, California to do ethnographic fieldwork exploring how community attachment impacts rural youth opioid abuse. To explore this, she will be conducting a series of in-depth interviews; she will be interviewing recovering opioid addicts and public service officials. Her goal is to gain a deep understanding about why the young use drugsparticularly opioidsat such pervasive rates in small towns. She hopes to use this information for theory development and to continue building on this project in graduate school. She is committed to advocating for rural communities. Rebecca is pictured Dr. Felitti, co author of the ACES study Adverse Childhood Experience Study at the Tudume County Opioid Conference; the study focuses on connecting childhood experiences to addiction.

Profile image of Rebecca Forbes
Major: American Studies major
Mentor: Mentor: Nathan Sayre, Geography
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