Saeed Ahmed, MD
Saeed Ahmed, MD, is an Addiction Psychiatrist, serves as the Medical Director of West Ridge Center at Rutland Regional Medical Center, Vermont. After graduating from Sindh Medical College Karachi, Pakistan, he completed Adult Psychiatry residency at Nassau University Medical Center, East Meadow, New York, followed by the Addiction Psychiatry fellowship at the Boston University Medical Center/ VA Boston Healthcare System.
During his residency, Dr. Ahmed served as a Chief Resident as well as on various committees of the residency program. He has been actively involved with the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in various capacities including APA diversity leadership fellow and a fellow member at the APA Council on Addiction Psychiatry. He is also a member of the membership committee of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry (AAAP). Being a former AADPRT Nyapati Rao/Francis Lu International Medical Graduate (IMG) Fellow, Dr. Ahmed has a distinct interest in mentoring IMGs, who seek residency/fellowship training in the United States. He currently provides addiction treatment services at West Ridge Recover clinic as well as to the inpatient psychiatry unit for people with and without co-occurring disorders.
In addition to his clinical work, his research focus is on substance use disorders, specifically, micro-induction of Buprenorphine / Naloxone, investigating off-label medications “repurposing” in substance use disorders, increasing access to and reducing barriers to the utilization of available treatments for substance use disorders.
Ebony Caldwell, MD, MPH
Ebony Caldwell, MD, MPH is a Georgia native who completed her general psychiatry residency training at Howard University Hospital (HUH) in Washington, DC, where she served as Chief Resident and an APA/APAF Leadership Fellow. During her time at HUH, she served as a HBCU C.A.R.E.S. Behavioral Health Ambassador, AAAP REACH scholar, and founded the Howard University H.O.P.E initiative, providing faith-communities and the public with opioid education and overdose reversal training.
Dr. Caldwell recently completed her Addiction Psychiatry fellowship at Yale School of Medicine, where she was involved in addiction education efforts for health professional students, clinicians, and trainees. She also serves as trainee representative for the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry, advocating for the needs of trainees interested in pursuing careers in Addiction Psychiatry. Dr. Caldwell will be continuing her trainee as a 2023-24 APA Jeanne Spurlock Congressional Fellowship and hopes to combine a career in medical education and policy work, focusing on increasing access to psychiatric treatment in marginalized communities and building a representative mental health workforce.
Fabiola Arbelo Cruz, MD
Dr. Fabiola Arbelo Cruz (she/her/ella) is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and Attending Addiction Psychiatrist at the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC) in New Haven, CT. She is a proud past REACH scholar from cohort 2020-2021. Currently, she provides outpatient psychiatric and addiction care to patients with severe mental Illness. One of her roles at CMHC includes working with the Street Psychiatry team, a mental health and addiction care delivery model that takes physicians and other providers to the streets to provide care to people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. Her academic interests include racial inequities in substance use treatment, substance use treatment in Latinx communities, stigma of addictive disorders and their treatment, and medical education.
Dr. Arbelo Cruz received her medical degree from Ponce Health Sciences University School of Medicine in Ponce, Puerto Rico. She trained in General Adult Psychiatry at Boston University/ Boston Medical Center, then completed an Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship at Yale.
Ricardo Cruz, MD
Dr. Ricardo Cruz is a primary care physician at Boston Medical Center in the Department of Medicine, Section of General Internal Medicine. He is a graduate of Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and the BUSM/Boston Medical Center (BMC) Internal Medicine Residency Primary Care Training Program. He is the Principal Investigator of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health funded Project RECOVER (Referral, Engagement, Coaching, Overdose preVention Education in Recovery), a project that utilizes peer recovery coaches to assist with engagement and retention of individuals with opioid use disorder into treatment and primary care services after completion of acute treatment services (detoxification). In addition, he is a Clinician Educator and is part of the Core Faculty of the Internal Medicine Primary Care Training Program at BUSM/BMC. He is in the BUSM Academy of Medical Educators where he teaches medical students during the pre-clinical doctoring courses with a focus on development of clinical reasoning. He has been a co-investigator on NIAAA and NIDA-funded randomized clinical trials testing medications for alcohol and cocaine use disorders. His interests are in providing primary care and treatment for substance use disorders for vulnerable populations including racial and ethnic minority communities, specifically, Latinx and individuals with history of criminal justice involvement.
E. Jennifer Edelman, MD, MHS
Dr. Edelman is an Associate Professor at the Yale School of Medicine. Certified as an internist, HIV specialist and in Addiction Medicine, she serves as the physician consultant for the Addiction Treatment Program at the Yale-New Haven Hospital Nathan Smith HIV clinic. Over the past 10 years, her work has focused on addressing opioid and alcohol use to promote HIV prevention and treatment. This includes leading NIH-funded studies focused on understanding harms associated with opioid use among patients living with HIV and efforts to promote implementation of addiction treatment in clinical settings. She is Associate Director of the Research in Addiction Medicine Scholars (RAMS) Program. She has a BS from Cornell University, MD from Columbia University and MHS from Yale University.
Ellen Edens, MD, MPE, MA
Dr. Edens is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine. In 2002, Dr. Edens received her MD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and completed psychiatry residency training and graduate work in psychiatric epidemiology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is board-certified in addiction psychiatry following advanced training in Addiction Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, where she joined the faculty in 2011. Dr. Edens is the Associate Director of the Addiction Psychiatry Residency at Yale, an ACGME-accredited program, overseeing the program’s didactic curriculum and clinical supervision. She serves as co-director of the VA Interprofessional Advanced Fellowship in Addiction Treatment. Her clinical and research interests dovetail in the areas of co-occurring addiction and chronic pain and expansion of access to evidence-based treatments for addiction, particularly opioid and alcohol use disorders. She is the clinical co-director of the VA Opioid Reassessment Clinic, a clinic designed to assess the safety, efficacy, and misuse of opioids by Veterans treated with prescription opioids for chronic pain. Additionally, she is actively working on developing and disseminating interprofessional educational material on the topic of addiction screening, diagnosis, and initiation of substance use treatment.
Holly Hagle, PhD
Holly Hagle, PhD, is a Program Director/Assistant Research Professor in the Collaborative to Advance Health Services, at the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s School of Nursing and Health Studies. She is the Co-Director of the National Addiction Technology Transfer Center (ATTC) Network Coordinating Office (NCO) and Principal Investigator (PI) for the Prevention Technology Transfer Center (PTTC) NCO. In addition, she is the UMKC PI and Co-Director on behalf of the ATTC Network for the Opioid State Targeted Response Technical Assistance (STR-TA) grant. Dr. Hagle has been actively working with medical and behavioral health providers for more than 15 years on the integration of behavioral health interventions.
Trent Hall, DO
Dr. Trent Hall is an Addiction Medicine physician and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center where he serves as Clinical Lead for the OSUWMC East Hospital Addiction Medicine Consult Service and supervises the Addiction Medicine Fellowship Continuity Clinic. His research involves the study of mechanisms underlying the relationship between chronic pain and addiction, individual difference factors influencing the withdrawal/negative affect stage of addiction, the epidemiology of accidental drug overdose – including among special populations (adolescents, young people, pregnant and perinatal people. etc.) – in Ohio and the United States, racial discrimination and health disparities in addiction treatment and addiction stigma.
Lamia Haque, MD, MPH
Lamia Haque completed her medical training at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University and a masters in public health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She completed her internal medicine training in the Yale Primary Care Residency Program followed by the Yale Addiction Medicine Fellowship. She is now a fellow in the Yale Digestive Diseases Section with a scholarly focus on epidemiology and treatment of substance use disorders in patients with chronic hepatitis C infection and cirrhosis.
Brady Heward, MD
Brady Heward, MD, attended medical school at Yale University School of Medicine. After completing medical school, he participated in a general psychiatry internship and residency at Yale. During residency he took advantage of the diverse clinical opportunities working at a community mental health center, a private hospital and at the VA. In addition he spent time researching how culture can impact parental behaviors and definitions of childhood maltreatment. Following residency, Dr. Heward participated in a public psychiatry fellowship at Yale working at the Connecticut Mental Health Center primarily working on the inpatient unit. He subsequently left Connecticut to complete a child and adolescent fellowship in Vermont. Dr. Heward is currently back at Yale completing an addiction fellowship and hopes to further work with diverse and underserved adolescents and young adults with co-occurring disorders.
Theddeus Iheanacho, MD
Dr. Theddeus Iheanacho, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine and the Medical Director of Errera Community Care Center, VA Connecticut Healthcare System. He is board certified in general psychiatry and addiction psychiatry. In addition to teaching and clinical work, he has research interest in substance use disorders, specifically, increasing access to and reducing barriers to the utilization of medication assisted treatment for substance use disorders in the homeless population. Dr. Iheanacho completed medical school in Nigeria and psychiatric training in Dublin, Ireland and the United States.
Jasser Khairallah, DO
Dr. Khairallah is an Assistant Professor in Clinical Family Medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He is double board certified in family medicine and addiction medicine. He completed medical school at A.T. Still University Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine followed by residency training in family medicine at Northwestern McGaw Medical Center. He continued on to the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health where he completed fellowship training in addiction medicine. During this time, he was a REACH fellow in Cohort 3 and completed research focusing on screening, diagnosis, and treatment of OUD in patients identifying as BIPOC. He went on to start a dual-diagnosis clinic at Eskenazi Health, a county operated and federally qualified health care system, in Indianapolis, Indiana where his practice primarily focuses on the treatment of patients with substance use disorders and co-occurring psychiatric diagnoses. Dr. Khairallah’s mission is to address the cultural and psychosocial barriers that exist in communities of color with the hope of increasing addiction treatment in the primary care setting. This involves taking a collaborative multidisciplinary approach to acknowledge and mitigate obstacles to sobriety including decades of intergenerational substance use, over-policing, and disinvestment in these communities. His interest in the overlap between addiction and the legal system has led him to pursue a Master of Jurisprudence in Health Law at the Loyola University School of Law. Dr. Khairallah also has a deep passion for educating the next generation of addiction providers. He serves as the Director of the Summer Scholar Program in Addiction Medicine for IU medical students, an elective preceptor for the Adolescent Medicine Fellowship Program at Riley Children’s Hospital, and assists with the clinical education of medical students at the Marian University School of Osteopathic Medicine. He is beyond excited to join as a mentor and welcome the next cohort of scholars to the REACH family!
Britney Lambert, MD
Britney Lambert, MD is a board certified psychiatrist and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Lambert graduated from Spelman College and Boston University School of Medicine. She completed residency at LSU-New Orleans where she served proudly as the resident chair of diversity and inclusion. Following residency she completed addiction psychiatry fellowship at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Lambert currently spends her clinical time as emergency psychiatry faculty at Ben Taub Hospital, a level one trauma center in Houston. In her free time, Dr. Lambert enjoys spending time with her family in her hometown of Fort Lauderdale.
Caridad C. Ponce Martinez, MD
I am currently an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at the UMass School of Medicine, as well as an Assistant Professor Adjunct in the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. I am double board certified in Psychiatry and in Addiction Psychiatry. I earned my undergraduate degree in Psychology at Tufts University and completed medical school at the Escuela Autónoma de Ciencias Médicas de Centro América in Costa Rica. I completed my adult psychiatry residency training at the University of Virginia, where I served as a Chief Resident and had an integral role in the evaluation of the Psychiatry residency program and its academic curriculum, particularly as related to substance use disorders. I then completed fellowship training in Addiction Psychiatry at Yale University. My clinical and research interests include expanding access to treatment for substance use disorders in a variety of clinical settings. In my role as medical director on an inpatient psychiatric unit, I have developed and implemented a protocol for treatment of opioid use disorder in the UMass inpatient psychiatric units. I am also currently conducting a study that evaluates the outcomes of initiating medication assisted treatment for patients with opioid use disorder during an acute inpatient psychiatric hospitalization. Additionally, I am the Addiction Psychiatry consultant at a local substance use disorder residential program for Latino men. As a result of my work there, I have become interested in exploring how the provision of culturally appropriate care for minority and underrepresented communities may improve outcomes. I have authored several articles in peer-reviewed journals and five book chapters, including one in the 10th edition of Kaplan & Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry.
Myra L. Mathis-Uwanogho, MD
Myra L. Mathis-Uwanogho, MD is a Senior Instructor and Attending Psychiatrist at the University of Rochester Department of Psychiatry in the Division of Community Psychiatry. She is a graduate of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and trained in General Adult and Addiction Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine. During training Dr. Mathis-Uwanogho served in dual chief positions as the Program-Wide and Medical Education Chief Resident and developed the Rebellious Psychiatry Conference, the first trainee-led event examining the intersection of mental health and social justice. She has worked in private, state and federal healthcare systems, providing psychiatric and substance use treatment to adolescent, adult, and geriatric populations. Dr. Mathis-Uwanogho currently treats patients at Strong Recovery, an outpatient dual-diagnosis clinic which houses an Opioid Treatment Program and provides a full range of addiction and psychiatric services. Her academic interests include health equity and racial justice, particularly as it relates to psychiatric and addiction treatment, psychotherapy and psychopharmacology for the treatment of substance use disorders, and medical education.
Nicky Mehtani, MD, MPH
Nicky Mehtani, MD MPH is an internist specializing in addiction medicine and a current NIDA T32 post-doctoral research fellow in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry. She currently practices clinically with San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Street Medicine team and was the former clinical lead for HHOME (HIV Homeless Outreach & Mobile Engagement), a multidisciplinary team designed to engage and retain in care some of the most severely impacted persons experiencing homelessness and living with HIV in San Francisco. She is a graduate of the inaugural REACH cohort (2019-20), through which she pursued clinical addiction medicine fellowship at UCSF after completing her residency in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital. As a REACH fellow and beyond, experiences working with patients from racial, sexual, and gender minorities in a variety of non-traditional clinical settings elucidated the limitations of existing care models and addiction pharmacotherapies in addressing the sociostructurally exposures and psychological traumas that underly the development and perpetuation of substance use disorders. These experiences motivated her to now pursue post-doctoral research and training as a NIDA T32 fellow focused on understanding the safety, feasibility, and accessibility of psychedelic-assisted therapy to support addiction treatment among marginalized patient populations who may be less likely to seek care in conventional settings.
LaTrice Montgomery, PhD
Dr. LaTrice Montgomery is a Research Associate Professor and Licensed Clinical Psychologist in the Center for Addiction Research/Addiction Sciences Division of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Medicine. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Cincinnati and completed her internship in the Division of Substance Abuse at the Yale University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on cannabis and tobacco use and co-use, medical marijuana and racial disparities in the prevention and treatment of substance use disorders. She currently has a career development award (K23) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop and pilot test a Twitter-based intervention designed to promote cannabis use reduction among young adults who frequently smoke blunts. Dr. Montgomery also has a pilot grant from UC to conduct a mixed methods study on the health and social effects of medical marijuana. Dr. Montgomery has served as an ad hoc reviewer for the NIH Interventions to Prevent and Treat Addictions Study Section and the VA Career Development Panel. She is an Associate Editor and Social Media Editor for the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, and an Associate Editor for Cannabis.
Kenneth Morford, MD
Dr. Morford is an Addiction Medicine Fellow and Postdoctoral Associate at Yale School of Medicine. He completed his residency in the Yale Primary Care Internal Medicine Program and served as Chief Resident for the VA Connecticut Healthcare System Center of Excellence in Primary Care Education. He currently provides primary care and addiction treatment services at the APT Foundation, which is a large, non-profit addiction recovery center focused on open access and harm reduction. He is a scholar in the Research in Addiction Medicine Scholars (RAMS) Program funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and studies the effects of benzodiazepine use in patients with opioid use disorder. He also works on two studies focused on integrating addiction treatment in HIV clinics. He is a clinical coach for medical and nurse practitioner students, faculty advisor for the Yale Addiction Medicine Collaborative, and teaches workshops related to addiction, chronic pain, motivational interviewing, and primary care.
Srinivas Muvvala, MD, MPH
Dr. Muvvala is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and the medical director of the Substance Abuse Treatment Unit (SATU) at the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC). He oversees the clinical and research programs at SATU and is involved in medical student, residency and fellowship education. His clinical and research interests are in investigating and disseminating optimal pharmacotherapies for the treatment of opioid, tobacco and alcohol use disorders and in providing comprehensive treatment for individuals with comorbid addictive and psychiatric disorders.
Alyssa F. Peterkin, MD
Alyssa F. Peterkin, MD is Instructor of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and an Internist within the Section of General Internal Medicine at Boston Medical Center. She received her medical degree from New York Medical College in 2016. During residency, she strived to reduce the stigma of addiction and focused on an initiative to educate residents and attendings on the treatments of alcohol use disorder. Following residency, she pursued addiction medicine fellowship training at Boston Medical Center and a year later, in 2020, she joined as faculty.
Dr. Peterkin currently serves as Associate Program Director for Education for the Grayken Addiction Medicine Fellowship at Boston Medical Center. She spends the majority of her clinical time inpatient working as a hospitalist and an attending on the addiction consult service, but also provides care in the low barrier bridge clinic. Her research interests include expanding access to addiction treatment and education.
Kevin M. Simon, MD
Dr. Kevin Simon is Boston’s inaugural Chief Behavioral Health Officer, appointed by Mayor Michelle Wu. He is leading a City-wide public health strategy through an equity lens to meet Boston’s growing behavioral health needs through the Boston Public Health Commission. Dr. Simon is a polymath: a physician-scientist, a healthcare policy expert, an inspirational teacher, and a noted writer. He is an attending child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist and addiction medicine specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital; an instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School; a Commonwealth Fund fellow in health policy at Harvard University; and the medical director of Wayside Youth & Family Support Network, a community behavioral health agency. Clinically, he cares for youth and families through the Adolescent Substance Use & Addiction Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. Academically, he has won multiple federal NIH awards for research on structural violence, health equity, and mental health. He oversaw the planning and implementation of a Community Behavioral Health Center funded by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health as medical director. Additionally, Dr. Simon consults on mental health system design and provides expert advice to federal agencies reviewing healthcare practices. Dr. Simon’s writings on health equity are in notable journals like the American Journal of Public Health and the New England Journal of Medicine. National audiences regularly seek his perspectives on mental health through trusted outlets.
Melissa B. Weimer, DO, MCR
Melissa Weimer is board certified in general internal medicine and addiction medicine. She became the Medical Director of the Yale Addiction Medicine Consult Service and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine in 2018. Prior to serving in this role she worked as the Chief of Behavioral Health and Addiction Medicine at St. Peter’s Health Partners in Albany, NY and as Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Internal Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, OR. Dr. Weimer’s career has focused on treating patients who struggle with concomitant chronic pain and substance use disorders, expanding access and expertise around medication treatments for substance use disorders, and creating access to substance use disorder care for hospitalized patients. Dr. Weimer is an experienced educator in helping providers understand substance use disorders, how to address concomitant pain and substance use disorder, and how to safely and effectively prescribe opioids in the outpatient and inpatient setting.
Tamika Chere’ Barkley Zapolski, PhDh
Tamika Zapolski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Indiana University Purdue University – Indianapolis. She is the director of the PRISM (Prevention Research In Substance Use & Minority Health) Lab which examines individual, interpersonal, and socio-cultural factors related to developmental risk for substance use and other health behaviors, particularly among racial/ethnic minority youth and young adults. Dr. Zapolski’s lab also examining risk and protective factors for other health behaviors, such as risky sexual behavior and illicit drug use, and examine pathways among various minoritized and underserved populations, including gender and sexual minorities, immigrant populations, and criminal justice populations. Dr. Zapolski currently has a K01 award through NIDA to examine the impact of inflammatory functioning on risk for marijuana and alcohol use as a consequence of racial discrimination exposure among African American youth, a proportion of which are criminal justice involved. Dr. Zapolski’s lab also has a second line of research examining the effectiveness of school and community-based interventions to reduce substance abuse and related emotional and psychological problems among adolescents. One of her interventions is an adaptation of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy for Adolescents (DBT-A) that this provided to at-risk students at local high schools to reduce adolescent substance use and related health outcomes. Preliminary findings have documented its efficacy of the intervention. Future studies will build off this work to examine long-term effects of the intervention, training school staff to implement the intervention, and cultural adaptations of the intervention to directly address bullying and racial discrimination among youth.