About Us

Roybal Center for Fearless Behavior Change logo

The Columbia Roybal Center aims to improve the well-being and prognosis of mid-life and older adults who experience serious health events such as heart attacks, strokes, and cancer diagnoses. We do this by developing interventions that reduce psychological distress and improve health behaviors that are important to recovery. Our Center is comprised of a team of highly collaborative scientists with expertise in multiple disciplines including behavioral medicine, cardiology, primary care, clinical psychology, exercise physiology, biostatistics, among others. We maintain a world-class research infrastructure experienced in recruiting and tracking patients who have experienced serious health events. We actively seek to enlist diverse investigators in our mission, and provide scientific, methodological, regulatory, and statistical support to their projects. We follow the NIH Stage Model and the experimental medicine approach when developing our interventions. Our Center receives strategic guidance from an advisory board that includes health system and scientific leaders in the field of behavioral medicine.

Our Services

  • Consultations on Behavioral Trials: Our Center is available to provide advice on the design, grant writing, and implementation of pilot behavioral trials. We also provide expertise on the experimental medicine approach to behavioral intervention development and work in close partnership with the NIH’s Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) initiative. The SOBC Research Network has identified specific measures for behavior change interventions in the three broad domains (self-regulation, stress reactivity, and stress resilience).
  • To learn more about SOBC, click here: https://scienceofbehaviorchange.org/what-is-sobc/