Speakers

Dr. John F. Kelly is the Elizabeth R. Spallin Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the Field of Addiction Medicine at Harvard Medical School – the first endowed professor in addiction medicine at Harvard. He is the founder and Director of the Recovery Research Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the Program Director of the Addiction Recovery Management Service (ARMS) and the Associate Director of the Center for Addiction Medicine at MGH.

Dr. Kelly is a past President of the American Psychological Association (APA) Society of Addiction Psychology, is a Fellow of the APA, and a Diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). He has served as a consultant to U.S. federal agencies such as the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH); to national non-Federal treatment institutions, such as the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation and Caron Foundation; and to foreign governments.

He has published more than 140 peer-reviewed articles, reviews, and chapters in the field of addiction science and is currently an Associate Editor for several academic journals in the addiction field.

His clinical and research work has focused on addiction treatment and the recovery process which and had included on the translation and implementation of evidence-based practices, addiction and criminal justice, addiction treatment theories and mechanisms of behavior change, and reducing stigma associated with addiction. He is a licensed clinical psychologist actively working with individuals and families with alcohol and other drug use disorders and is a Patient’s Choice award recipient for 2016.

Lula Beatty, Ph.D., is the Senior Director, Health Disparities Office, American Psychological Association. She is responsible for the conceptualization of program goals, translation of those goals into programs and activities and the development of resources and collaborations.  Major programs include smoking/tobacco health disparities, HIV/AIDS, health disparities in vulnerable boys and men, stress and health disparities, a working group on implicit bias/preschool suspensions, and a Health Equity Ambassadors program.

She was the founding Director of the Special Populations Office, Office of the Director, National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIH. She was responsible for the creation and execution of diversity in science and health disparities programs including the development of special initiatives, e.g., South Africa Initiative, African Americans and criminal justice, and health disparities in boys and men.

Before joining NIDA, she was Director of Research at the Institute for Urban Affairs and Research, Howard University, where she was involved in training and research programs on child abuse and neglect, Black family strengths, and mental health in Black communities.  She has edited journal issues on health disparities and published on drug abuse related topics.

She is a member of the American Psychological Association, the American Public Health Association, Sisters of the Academy, and within APA, is a Fellow in the Society of Women in Psychology and the Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues.  She has also served as President of the Section of the Psychology of Black Women and executive committee member of the Leadership Institute for Women in Psychology.

Eric E. Sterling, JD, is the Executive Director of The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a private non-profit educational organization that helps educate the nation about criminal justice issues and failed global drug policy. Mr. Sterling frequently lectures at colleges, universities, and professional societies throughout the nation and is regularly interviewed by the national news media.

Mr. Sterling helped found and serves on the boards of directors of FAMM — Families Against Mandatory Minimums (Secretary) and Marijuana Majority (Vice-Chair). He also serves on the boards of directors of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, and the Andean Information Network. Mr. Sterling also serves on the advisory boards of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), DrugSense, Drug Reform Coordination Network (DRCNet), Flex Your Rights Foundation, and Sex Workers Outreach Project. He helped found FEAR — Forfeiture Endangers American Rights in 1993, the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) in 1995, the Interfaith Drug Policy Initiative in 2003, and the Voluntary Committee of Lawyers, and served on their boards. Mr. Sterling was Editor-in-Chief of NewsBriefs, the newsletter of the National Drug Strategy Network, for ten years.

Mr. Sterling was Counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary from 1979 until 1989. On the staff of the Subcommittee on Crime, (Rep. William J. Hughes (D-NJ), Chairman), he was responsible for drug enforcement, gun control, money laundering, organized crime, pornography, terrorism, corrections, and military assistance to law enforcement, among many issues. He was a principal aide in developing the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, and other laws.

For twenty-five years he was very active on the American Bar Association Health Law Section Task Force on Substance Use Disorders. He is a past chair of the Criminal Justice Committee of the ABA Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities.

Dr. Marc Fishman, MD, is an addiction psychiatrist and a member of the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Fishman is a national expert on adolescent addiction treatment and program development. His academic work has focused on models of care and treatment outcomes for addictions in youth, in particular opioid dependence.

Dr Fishman leads Maryland Treatment Centers, a regional behavioral health care provider, which includes Mountain Manor Treatment Center in Baltimore for adolescents, Mountain Manor Treatment Center in Emmitsburg MD for adults, as well as several other inpatient and outpatient programs. In that role he has been involved in development and implementation of innovative programming in addiction and co-occurring disorder treatment. His clinical specialties include treatment of drug-involved and dual-diagnosis adolescents, opioid dependence in adolescents and adults, and addiction with co-morbid pain. His research work has focused on models of care and treatment outcomes in adolescent addictions, in particular opioid dependence.

Dr. Fishman served as a co-editor for the most recent edition of ASAM’s Patient Placement Criteria (PPC 2-R), and served as the chief editor for the ASAM PPC Supplement on Pharmacotherapies for Alcohol Use Disorders. He is the chair of the Treatment Criteria Committee for ASAM. He is the President (2010-12) of the Maryland Society of Addiction Medicine.

Judson Brewer MD, PhD is the Director of Research at the Center for Mindfulness and associate professor in medicine and psychiatry at UMass Medical School. He also is adjunct faculty at Yale University, and a research affiliate at MIT. A psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for addictions, Brewer has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for addictions, including both in-person and app-based treatments (www.goeatrightnow.com, www.cravingtoquit.com). He has also studied the underlying neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI, and source-estimated EEG, and is currently translating these findings into clinical use. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, presented to the US President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, trained US Olympic coaches, been featured on 60 minutes, at TED (6,000,000+ views; 4^th most viewed talk of 2016), TEDMED, TEDx, in Time magazine (top 100 new health discoveries of 2013), Forbes, Businessweek, NPR and the BBC among others. He is the author of The Craving Mind: from cigarettes to smartphones to love, why we get hooked and how we can break bad habits (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

Aaron White, Ph.D., is the Senior Scientific Advisor to the Director at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). His areas of scientific expertise include alcohol-induced memory blackouts, the impact of alcohol and other drugs on brain function and behavior, particularly during the adolescent years, and prevention strategies.

Dr. White received his PhD in biological psychology from Miami University in Ohio in 1999. His graduate research focused on the brain mechanisms underlying alcohol-induced memory blackouts. He examined the impact of alcohol on the activity of individual hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells and other hippocampal neurons in intact brains. This work revealed that alcohol suppresses the activity of pyramidal cells, known to be central to episodic memory function, and provided a model for how alcohol produces blackouts. Next he completed a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center in 2001 and then served as a Research Assistant Professor in the department until 2008. His research there focused on the effects of alcohol on adolescent brain function and brain development, alcohol blackouts, adolescent substance abuse treatment and the development of high school and college alcohol prevention and education initiatives. Dr. White co-wrote the online alcohol prevention course, AlcoholEdu, which has been completed by more than 3 million high school and college students to date.

He joined NIAAA in 2008 and, until recently, was the Program Director for underage and college drinking research in the Division of Epidemiology and Prevention Research. In 2015, he was promoted to Senior Scientific Advisor to the Director, Dr. George Koob. In this position, Dr. White advises the Director regarding a wide variety of scientific topic areas in alcohol and other drug research. He also frequently takes part in media interviews and delivers presentations on behalf of the Institute, including a recent presentation on addiction and the brain at a meeting of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime in Vienna, Austria. He is an author on more than 60 manuscripts and book chapters, as well as three books, and has delivered several hundred presentations about alcohol, the brain and the prevention of underage drinking.

Dr. Raymond Tademy, Ph.D., is currently the Education Department Coordinator, Internal Programs Department, of the Richmond City Justice Center. Dr. Tademy received his Bachelor’s of Science, Master’s of Science, and Doctorate in Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). Over the past 10 years, he has also been an instructor for the Virginia Department of Correctional Education and a volunteer in support of the education and re-entry of incarcerated populations at the former James River Correctional Center, Powhatan Correctional Center, and Deep Meadow Correctional Center. This included teaching fatherhood classes, establishing public speaking groups, and an inmate-led think tank that conceptualized pre and post release re-entry programs: These ideas were formerly presented, via a debate format, to the Virginia Re-entry Commission in November 2010.

Dr. Tademy has conducted research in HIV prevention, substance abuse, adolescent education outcomes, and health practices and decision making among African American male populations while serving as a program evaluator for the Center of Cultural Experiences in Prevention at VCU. As the Education Department Coordinator, he conducts GED preparation and testing for residents of the Richmond City Justice Center (RCJC) in collaboration with Richmond City Public Schools, particularly the Adult Learning Center. The Education Department also works with the VCU Open Minds program, University of Richmond, and Virginia Union University in providing opportunities for RCJC residents to take college-level classes alongside college students. He is currently conducting research on relationships between field independent and field dependent cognitive learning styles, early school experiences, self-efficacy for academic achievement, and the effects of RCJC educational participation upon criminal identity among RCJC residents. His talk will be titled: “The Invisible Elephant: Rarely addressed barriers

Dr. Tademy is a 25-year Marine Corps veteran and has served as an adjunct faculty member for VCU and an assistant professor at Norfolk State University. He is a native of Jacksonville, Arkansas, and is proud of his bowling skills, mediates daily, was the technical writer for two books that discussed rope jumping for optimum fitness and competitive performance, and is a high-intensity interval training enthusiast.

Claudrena N. Harold is an associate professor of African American and African Studies and History at the University of Virginia. In 2007, she published her first book, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942. In 2013, the University of Virginia Press published The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration, a volume Harold coedited with Deborah E. McDowell and Juan Battle. Her latest book is New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South, which was published by the University of Georgia Press. As a part of her ongoing work on the history of black student activism at UVA, she wrote, produced, and co-directed with Kevin Everson two short films, Sugarcoated Arsenic and We Demand. Sugarcoated Arsenic screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Vienna International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, and Porto Post Doc Film and Media Festival. We Demand screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2016.

 

Kirk Warren Brown is an Associate Professor of Social Psychology and Health Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Director of the Contemplative Science and Education Core in the College Behavioral and Emotional Health Institute (COBE). His research centers on the importance of awareness of internal states and behavior to healthy human functioning, with a particular interest in the nature of mindfulness and the value of mindfulness training to enhance emotion regulation, behavior regulation, and mental health. He has authored numerous journal articles on these topics and has edited two scholarly volumes, including the Handbook of Mindfulness: Theory, Research, and Practice (Guilford Press, 2015) and the new Oxford Handbook of Hypo-egoic Phenomena (Oxford University Press, 2016). His work has been featured in numerous national and international media outlets. Dr. Brown is an Academic Editor at the journal PLOS ONE and an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. He also teaches the evidence-based Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program to Richmond, VA community members.

 

Mishka Terplan MD MPH is board certified in both obstetrics and gynecology and in addiction medicine. His clinical, research and advocacy interests lie along the intersection of reproductive and behavioral health. He attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, Residency at the University of Southern California, and completed a research fellowship at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is currently Professor in both Obstetrics and Gynecology and Psychiatry and the Associate Director of Addiction Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is also the Addiction Medicine Consultant for DMAS (Department of Medicaid Services, VA) and a consultant for the National Center on Substance Abuse and Child Welfare. Dr Terplan has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles, has active grant-funded research, and represents both ACOG (American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) and ASAM (American Society of Addiction Medicine) on various federal taskforces and committees including the AMA (American Medical Association) Taskforce to Reduce Opioid Abuse. He has spoken in front of congress and at high schools, and many places in between.

Danielle M. Dick, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Human and Molecular Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University.  She received her Ph.D. in Psychology in 2001 from Indiana University and subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics. She was on the faculty at Washington University, St. Louis from 2003 – 2007 before joining VCU.  Her research involves studying how genetic predispositions interact with environmental factors to contribute to patterns of substance use/dependence and related behavioral disorders across development. She is the founder and current Director of the College Behavioral and Emotional Health Institute at VCU.  She launched and co-directs the Spit for Science project, which has enrolled nearly 10,000 college students in order to study substance use and emotional health outcomes across the college years.  She has served as the Principal Investigator (PI) or site PI on 10 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, and Co-Investigator on another 6 NIH grants, with grant funding totaling >20 million dollars. She is the previous recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, an NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship, a NARSAD Young Investigator Award, and an NIAAA K02 mid-career award. She has >200 peer-reviewed publications, and has won numerous awards, including the Behavior Genetics Association Fuller & Scott Award for Outstanding Young Investigator in 2006, the Fulker Award for best paper published in the journal Behavior Genetics in 2007, the Research Society on Alcoholism Young Investigator Award in 2010, the World Congress on Psychiatric Genetics Richard Todd Award in Child Psychiatry in 2011, the World Congress on Psychiatric Genetics Theodore Reich Young Investigator Award in 2012, and the inaugural Indiana University Department of Psychology Young Alumni award in 2013. 

 

Dr. Joshua Langberg is an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in the Department of Psychology, Director or the Promoting Adolescent School Success (PASS) research group and Co-Director of the VCU Center for ADHD Research, Service, and Education. Dr. Langberg’s research focuses on the identification of factors that predict the educational and behavioral functioning of adolescents and young adults with externalizing behavior problems and on the development and evaluation of school/university-based interventions that target those factors. He has been Principal Investigator on multiple large federally funded grants from National Institutes of Health and U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES). As part of these projects, Dr. Langberg has focused on the identification of factors that promote a successful college experience for students with ADHD. He has extensive experience developing and implementing interventions in college and university settings, including an on-going randomized controlled trial evaluating the efficacy of a group and mentoring intervention for college students with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Dr. Langberg focuses on developing interventions that are feasible to implement using typical resources and that have the potential for widespread dissemination. He developed and disseminated the Homework, Organization, and Planning Skills (HOPS) intervention which is now used in many school in the United
States.

Rhonda Thissen, MSW, works on policy and planning issues related to services for adults with serious mental health disorders and those experiencing homelessness at the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services. Ms. Thissen earned a Master’s degree in Social Work at Virginia Commonwealth University, and in her role as a social work policy practitioner, has worked for both public agencies and not-for-profit organizations on a wide range of issues, including promoting access to primary medical and behavioral health care, improving economic opportunities in underserved communities, developing and coordinating affordable housing and homeless services, domestic violence intervention, and HIV/AIDS care. She is also an adjunct professor of Social Work at Virginia Commonwealth University.

 

Barbara Burke, LCSW, is the Director of Adolescent and Young Adult Programs for the Family Counseling Center for Recovery. She received her MSW from the VCU School of Social Work in 1978 and has been working as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker for 30 years. She specializes in the assessment and treatment of Adolescents and Young Adults and has developed the Adolescent Early Intervention and Intensive Outpatient Programs for FCCR. Barbara believes in the importance of family involvement and works to motivate young people to understand their relationship with substances and their risk factors for dependence. Seeing adolescents and young adults explore what is possible in their lives is what energizes her. She has also been involved in establishing a Collegiate Recovery Program at VCU (“Rams in Recovery”) to provide social support for college students in recovery.

Linda Hancock, Ph.D, FNP serves as both a student health clinician and Director of The Wellness Resource Center. She is an animated health educator whose specialties over the years have included all the “S’s”: sexual health, substance abuse, and stress management.

She is currently the tobacco cessation guru for students at VCU and leads a campus-wide social norms marketing campaign to reduce substance misuse. She is a major fan of the Rams in Recovery program.

 

Mike Zohab is a lifelong resident of Henrico County and has been a Richmond Police Officer for 28 years. The majority of his law enforcement career has been in investigations with a primary focus in all levels of drug enforcement. These include working in an undercover capacity, supervision of narcotic and violent crime investigations, asset forfeiture and money laundering investigations, and currently the Commander in charge of the Special Investigation Division.

In 2013 Mike saw a need for the renovation of how law enforcement addressed opiate addicts. The drastic increase in over-dose victims, coupled with years of professional and personal contact with individuals struggling with addiction, fueled a passion to be a change agent in this opiate epidemic. Mike instituted policy changes and educational programs to better serve the victims of the disease of addiction and in the spring of 2016 founded the Virginia Recovery Foundation. In his downtime Mike loves all aspects of outdoor life- in particular fishing and hunting.

 

Jasmin Vassileva, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research program focuses on the effects of different classes of drugs on neurocognitive functioning.

Dr. Vassileva’s more recent studies investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying impulsivity and risky behavior in the externalizing spectrum of adult psychopathology (drug addiction, psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, adult ADHD) and within the context of HIV.