November 18, 2025, Durham, NC – This year, iRT has been collaborating with the Southeast Prevention Technology Transfer Center (Southeast PTTC) to support their efforts to advance substance misuse prevention.

The Southeast PTTC, housed at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, is one of 10 regional centers that are part of the Prevention Technology Transfer Center (PTTC) Network. The network was created to improve the implementation and delivery of evidence-based substance misuse prevention strategies across the nation. Funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the Southeast PTTC offers training and technical assistance services to the substance misuse prevention workforce in eight states in the southeastern United States, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

As part of the collaboration, iRT completed four main tasks for the Southeast PTTC:

  1. iRT proposed and implemented a method for the Southeast PTTC to develop a curriculum to teach community leaders and prevention specialists about why and how to get involved developing environmental strategies to address substance misuse prevention. The method included a modified version of the DELPHI process to identify the curriculum learning domains and objectives.
  2. iRT converted recordings from 3 webinars into asynchronous, interactive eLearning courses designed to help prevention professionals with successful grant writing.
  3. iRT developed a plan for communicating with learners and tracking their use of the resources created by the Southeast PTTC. iRT is continuing to customize our Learning Management System (LMS) (called eTrove) to automate the awarding of certificates and certifications for those who complete the Southeast PTTC’s trainings and to generate reports of learner outcomes from eLearning content.
  4. iRT Research Scientist Dr. Rebecca Stelter co-authored, with Southeast PTTC Founder and Co-Director Dr. Mark Wolfson, a research poster titled “Applying Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing to Advance Prevention Systems Research,” presented at the 2025 Society for Prevention Research annual conference held May 2025 in Seattle, WA. The poster presentation described the Natural Language Processing methods the team used to analyze the website content across all of the PTTC networks’ websites to identify the most common keywords and themes that characterized the work of the PTTC network. This information is useful for informing future research and practice on the PTTC network and other elements of the national infrastructure supporting substance misuse prevention.

To learn more about the Southeast PTTC’s important work, visit https://pttcnetwork.org/center/southeast-pttc/, and sign up for the Southeast PTTC newsletter and listserv by clicking here.

If you are interested in collaborating with iRT on your projects, contact us at info@irtinc.us.