Chinazo Cunningham, MD, MS

Dr. Chinazo Cunningham is Commissioner of the New York Office of Addiction Services and Supports where she oversees one of the nation’s largest system of substance use and addiction services. She is a physician trained in primary care internal medicine and addiction medicine and has spent over 20 years providing care, developing programs, and conducting research with people who use drugs. For decades, she has also collaborated with community-based harm reduction organizations. Her research has focused on improving access to care, utilization of health care services, and health outcomes. Dr. Cunningham has authored over 150 peer-reviewed manuscripts, has been the principal investigator on numerous federally-funded grants, and has been recognized by local and national awards. Dr. Cunningham has also served on and chaired numerous national advisory committees, guideline committees, and grant-review study sections.

Laura Kwako, PhD

Dr. Laura Kwako is chief of the Treatment, Health Services, & Recovery Branch (THSRB) in the Division of Treatment and Recovery at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. THSRB supports research in broad categories including health services, behavioral health treatments and mechanisms of behavior change, recovery, translational research, and innovative methods and technologies applied across the continuum of care. Other areas of interest include topics focusing on special emphasis and underserved populations, including NIH-designated health disparity populations, individuals with co-occurring disorders, and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). During Dr. Kwako’s time at NIAAA, she has been involved in development of the Healthcare Professional’s Core Resource on Alcohol, as well as the Addictions Neuroclinical Assessment. Dr. Kwako received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the Catholic University of America and completed postdoctoral clinical training at Springfield Hospital Center in Maryland, specializing in treatment for addiction and trauma-related disorders in an inpatient, primarily forensic, setting. Dr. Kwako is licensed in Washington, DC and credentialed at the NIH Clinical Research Center as a clinical psychologist.

Carlos Blanco, MD, PhD, MS

Dr. Carlos Blanco is the Director of the Division of Epidemiology, Services, and Prevention Research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Dr. Blanco is an expert in the epidemiology and treatment of mood, anxiety and addictive disorders. He is a practicing clinician, researcher and administrator. Prior to joining NIDA, Dr. Blanco was Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. Dr. Blanco has authored over 350 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Blanco is an elected member of the US National Academy of Medicine.

Tisha Wiley, PhD

Dr. Tisha Wiley is chief of the Services Research Branch (SRB) in the Division of Epidemiology, Services and Prevention Research (DESPR) at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. SRB supports a portfolio of research and career development grants that study the design and delivery of high-quality, personalized addiction treatment services to support sustained recovery from addiction. SRB supports research at multiple levels (individual, clinician, organization, community, and systems) to achieve this goal. Dr. Wiley also serves as NIDA’s Associate Director for Justice Systems, providing leadership across NIDA on justice-related issues, including as director of NIDA’s Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN); and serves as co-chair of the Translation of Research to Practice Workgroup for the NIH HEAL Initiative. During her time at NIDA and NIH, Dr. Wiley has developed and led dozens of initiatives across a wide range of topics, including implementation science, social media, methodology and measurement, and more. Prior to joining NIDA, Dr. Wiley was a Society for Research in Child Development Fellow and American Association for the Advancement of Science Policy (SRCD/AAAS) Fellow at the Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research at NIH, where she worked on several methodological initiatives, including leading the offices’ efforts around data visualization and visual analytics.

Laura Kwako, PhD

Dr. Laura Kwako is chief of the Treatment, Health Services, & Recovery Branch (THSRB) in the Division of Treatment and Recovery at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.  THSRB supports research in broad categories including health services, behavioral health treatments and mechanisms of behavior change, recovery, translational research, and innovative methods and technologies applied across the continuum of care.  Other areas of interest include topics focusing on special emphasis and underserved populations, including NIH-designated health disparity populations, individuals with co-occurring disorders, and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD).  During Dr. Kwako’s time at NIAAA, she has been involved in development of the Healthcare Professional’s Core Resource on Alcohol, as well as the Addictions Neuroclinical Assessment.  Dr. Kwako received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the Catholic University of America and is licensed in Washington, DC and credentialed at the NIH Clinical Research Center as a psychologist.

Yuhua Bao, PhD

Dr. Yuhua Bao is a professor and health economist in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine and a co-investigator of CHERISH. Her research centers on aligning incentives, especially provider payment, with evidence-based, integrated care for people with mental health and/or substance use conditions. A major ongoing focus is to evaluate policies designed to address the opioid crisis, in terms of both intended and unintended consequences, with particular attention to patients with cancer-related pain. Her team works with population claims data extensively and has ongoing projects using commercial insurance claims, Medicare data including the SEER-Medicare linked database, and the newly available national Medicaid data known as the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS).

Jake Morgan, PhD

Dr. Jake Morgan is a health services researcher specializing in using real-world data to inform evidence-based policy, update clinical guidelines, and improve patient access to and quality of care. Dr. Morgan works closely with The Center for Health Economics of Treatment Interventions for Substance Use Disorder, HCV, and HIV (CHERISH) as a member of the Population Data and Modeling Core and is the primary representative for Boston University School of Public Health. In this capacity his expertise is leveraging large real world datasets such as commercial claims or electronic health record data. Using these population claims data, his work is focused on the opioid overdose epidemic and how to best support patients by promoting access and retention to medications for opioid use disorder.

Inbal Billie Nahum-Shani, PhD

Dr. Inbal Billie Nahum-Shani’s primary research interest is harnessing adaptive interventions to transform health care. Adaptive interventions address the changing needs of individuals by modifying their treatment based on dynamic information about their state and progress. An important focus of her work is the Just-In-Time Adaptive Intervention (JITAI), a special type of adaptive intervention that leverages powerful mobile and sensing technologies to adapt the delivery of support in real-world settings—in near real-time. Her work is highly multidisciplinary, spanning behavioral health and applied psychology, while also being tightly integrated with advanced research methodology. She developed the Hybrid Experimental Design (HED) to help health scientists optimize the integration of human-delivered (e.g., coaching session) components with digital (e.g., mobile-based) components, which necessitates adaptation on multiple timescales.   

Daniel Almirall, PhD

Dr. Daniel Almirall is a statistician who develops methods to form evidence-based adaptive interventions. Adaptive interventions are used to guide individualized intervention decisions for the on-going management of chronic illnesses or disorders such as drug abuse, depression, anxiety, autism, obesity, or HIV/AIDS. More recently, Dr. Almirall has been developing methods to inform the construction of optimized multilevel adaptive implementation interventions (MAISYs) using Multilevel Implementation SMARTs (MI-SMARTs). He is particularly interested in applications in mental health and substance use.   

Susan A. Murphy, PhD 

Dr. Susan Murphy’s research focuses on improving sequential, individualized, decision making in digital health. She developed the micro-randomized trial for use in constructing digital health interventions; this trial design is in use across a broad range of health-related areas. Her lab works on online learning algorithms for developing personalized digital health interventions. Dr. Murphy is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the National Academy of Medicine, both of the US National Academies. In 2013 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work on experimental designs to inform sequential decision making. She is a Fellow of the College on Problems in Drug Dependence, Past-President of Institute of Mathematical Statistics and a former editor of the Annals of Statistics.   

Linda M. Collins, PhD 

Dr. Linda Collins’ research focuses on the development, dissemination, and application of the multiphase optimization strategy (MOST), an innovative methodological framework for optimizing and evaluating interventions in public health, education, criminal justice, and many other fields. MOST integrates ideas from engineering, behavioral science, multivariate statistics, health economics, and decision analysis. The objective of MOST is to improve intervention effectiveness, affordability, scalability, and efficiency, balancing these strategically to achieve intervention EASE. Dr. Collins has collaborated on research applying MOST in a range of areas, including HIV, smoking cessation, prevention of excessive alcohol use in college students, and weight loss. She is currently also collaborating on development of methods for optimization of adaptive interventions; decision-making based on the results of an optimization trial; and optimizing interventions for value-efficiency. Her research has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and the National Science Foundation.

Maureen Stewart, PhD

Bio coming soon!

Christina Andrews, PhD

Dr. Christina M. Andrews is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Services Policy and Management at the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health. Her research focuses on public financing for substance use disorder treatment. She is currently leading two studies funded by the National Institutes of Health assessing the effects of Medicaid managed care on access to alcohol use disorder treatment (with Amanda Abraham) and opioid use disorder treatment (with Colleen Grogan). Dr. Andrews also serves as Deputy Regional Editor for the Americas for Addiction. Her research has been supported by the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and other government and nonprofit organizations. She received her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Chicago. 

Julie Donohue, PhD

Dr. Julie M. Donohue is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health. She also serves as an Associate Editor for JAMA Health Forum. She directs the Medicaid Research Center which provides analytic support to the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services. Dr. Donohue conducts research on insurance coverage, financing, and delivery of health care with a focus on use of behavioral health services, and pharmaceuticals. In collaboration with AcademyHealth and several academic-state partnerships, she launched the Medicaid Outcomes Distributed Research Network (MODRN) in 2017 to support multi-state Medicaid policy evaluations. Her research has been funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, and by several foundations.

Megan Schuler, PhD, MS

Dr. Megan Schuler is an applied statistician at the RAND Corporation. Her research focuses on substance use and mental health disorders and methodologically on causal inference methods which facilitate rigorous analysis of observational health data. As a co-investigator affiliated with the RAND Opioid Policy Tools and Information Center (OPTIC), a primary focus of her current work is opioid policy research. In particular, her work seeks to develop and disseminate state of the art statistical methods for evaluating the effectiveness of state and federal opioid policies. Another central research interest is heterogeneity in substance use and mental health behaviors, disorders, and treatment, with respect to variation across age and population subgroups. 

Beth Ann Griffin, PhD, SM

Dr. Beth Ann Griffin is a senior statistician at the RAND Corporation and a founding Co-Director of the RAND Center for Causal Inference, which promotes dissemination of advanced causal modeling techniques to researchers around the globe. Griffin has published extensively on methodological developments for drawing more robust inferences using observational data and substantive findings regarding substance use treatments. She has been actively involved in developing numerous short courses on causal inference methods as well as creating user-friendly tools that provide guidance on optimal ways to estimate the causal effects of state-level policy, including in the presence of co-occurring policies. The statistical methods and resources generated by her work are advancing the field by facilitating high-quality evaluations of complex policy interventions.

Mark McGovern, PhD, MA

Dr. Mark McGovern is a Professor of Psychiatry and of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He leads three national centers that serve as innovative platforms to leverage the science of implementation to improve equitable access to high quality health care. Dr. McGovern was the first medical director of integrated behavioral health in the Division of Primary Care at Stanford and has spearheaded multiple projects designed to improve high quality and equitable access to addiction medications in routine health care across the states of Vermont and California. He is a mentor to numerous individuals across the country and at Stanford, from university undergraduates to mid-career faculty and clinical administrators at academic institutions and health care systems nationwide.

Sara Becker, PhD

Dr. Sara Becker is the Alice Hamilton Professor of Psychiatry and Inaugural Director of the Center for Dissemination and Science at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She conducts programmatic research designed to equitably and intentionally bridge the gap between public health knowledge and practice. Her work incorporates both patient-focused dissemination (e.g., direct-to-consumer marketing, technology-assisted interventions) and provider-focused implementation (e.g., multi-level implementation approaches, workforce development) strategies. Dr. Becker has been Principal Investigator or Scientific Lead of 11 federally funded implementation science projects from NIDA, NIAAA, SAMHSA, PEPFAR, and AHRQ. In 2021, Dr. Becker was honored to be the first implementation scientist to receive a Method to Extend Research in Time (MERIT) award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which provides up to 10 years of stable funding support for distinguished investigators.

Hélène Chokron Garneau, PhD, MPH

Dr. Hélène Chokron Garneau is a Senior Research Scientist at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Co-Director of the Center for Dissemination and Implementation Science At Stanford (C-DIAS). Her current efforts focus on elucidating how contextual determinants influence the implementation of evidence based practices. She is particularly interested in applying this knowledge to eliminate disparities in health services for mental health and addiction treatment. Dr. Chokron Garneau obtained both her PhD and MPH in Public Health from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health where she concurrently worked to assist in the development, implementation, and evaluation of behavioral interventions for substance users with comorbid psychiatric diagnoses.

Cecelia Calhoun, MD, MPHS, MBA

Dr. Cecelia Calhoun is an Assistant Professor of Medicine (Hematology) and (Hematology/ Oncology) at Yale University School of Medicine where her clinical and research expertise center on the care of persons with Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) She also serves as the Medical Director of the Adult Sickle Cell Program at Smilow Cancer Hospital Dr. Calhoun uses mixed methods to find solutions to the educational and healthcare obstacles critical to the longevity of adolescents with sickle cell disease. She has dedicated her career to the design and implementation of evidence-based interventions that promote successful transition from youth to adult care for the sickle cell population. As an NIH funded investigator, she collaborates with her hematology colleagues across the nation to use Implementation Science methods to improve outcomes for patients with sickle cell disease throughout their lifespans. ​Born in Detroit, Michigan, Dr. Calhoun​ graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Afro-American Studies and Medical Doctorate from Wayne State University. She continued her training at Michigan State University as a pediatric resident, then fellowship at Washington University School of Medicine where she also completed a Master of Population Health Sciences.​ She received her MBA as one of three, inaugural Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellows in Minority Health Leadership at Yale University School of Management.

Lori Ducharme, PhD

Dr. Lori Ducharme is a Program Official in NIDA’s Services Research Branch. She leads the branch’s portfolio of institutional training and research education grants, and supports a portfolio of research and career development grants applying implementation science theory and methods to address priority service delivery issues. She is also the NIDA Science Officer for the Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN), a major collaborative effort supporting research to implement evidence-based SUD treatment practices for individuals involved in the criminal-legal system.