Events

Gavin Bart is Director of the Division of Addiction Medicine at Hennepin Healthcare and Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. He received his MD from the University of Minnesota and trained in internal medicine at the Hennepin County Medical Center. His PhD is in experimental and clinical pharmacology, also from the University of Minnesota. His areas of expertise include clinical pharmacology and the pharmacological management of opioid use disorders. His current research areas include the population pharmacokinetics of methadone, genetic influences of methadone pharmacology and treatment outcome, and implementation of opioid use disorder treatment in hospital and primary care settings. He is PI of NorthStar Node of the NIDA National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network and has provided extensive international technical assistance including to the PEPFAR/Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s capacity building HIV and addiction efforts in Vietnam and South East Asia and the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs’ effort to develop international technology transfer centers for addiction prevention and treatment.

Skyler Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Public Health at Yale University who conducts research focusing on the ways individuals’ social identities (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation) shape their everyday lives and influence health and well-being. In particular, he is interested in how experiences of stigma—if not adequately coped with—interfere with psychological functioning and contribute to health disparities. Supporting his research, Dr. Jackson has received an NIMH K01 entitled, “Intersectional stigma, mental health, and HIV risk among US GBM of color”.

Justin Knox is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Implementation Science and Intervention (in Psychiatry) at Columbia University. His research focuses on HIV and substance use among racial and sexual minorities, both domestically and globally. He is the PI of a K01 award to develop and evaluate an intervention that aims to improve HIV treatment outcomes and reduce alcohol use in heavy-drinking Black MSM.

Diana Sheehan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work at Florida International University (FIU). She aims to contribute to health equity among the Latino population via epidemiologic studies that identify disparities along the HIV care continuum and via the design and testing of evidence-based interventions. Her current K01 examines how daily substance use, psychosocial factors, and activity spaces affect ART adherence and develops the groundwork for a just-in-time adaptive intervention to improve ART adherence.

Suzan Walters is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Epidemiology in the Department of Population Health at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and an affiliated researcher at CDUHR. Her current K01 grant focuses on how intersectional stigma experiences affect health outcomes among people who use drugs. She has worked as an ethnographer for the National HIV Behavioral Surveillance System, a program director for the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities, and a research fellow for AIDS Foundation Chicago.

Lindsey Friend is a Research Training and Career Development Program Officer (Health Science Administrator) in the Office of Research Training, Diversity, and Health Disparities at the National institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Her priority is to assist NIDA’s extramural research training and career development programs. Lindsey received her doctorate in neuroscience from Brigham Young University where she studied cocaine and cannabinoid effects on reward circuitry. She did a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development studying glutamate receptor physiology before joining NIDA in 2020.

Dustin T. Duncan is the Director of the CDUHR Pilot Projects and Mentoring Core and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where he directs the Columbia Spatial Epidemiology Lab and co-directs the department’s Social and Spatial Epidemiology Unit. Dr. Duncan is a Social and Spatial Epidemiologist, studying how specific neighborhood characteristics influence population health and health disparities.

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How do we move from formative work and observational studies documenting health inequities to designing, testing, and implementing interventions?, Dr. Sevelius will share their approach to building a program of community-engaged research to improve health outcomes among transgender and gender expansive communities. This approach includes iterative needs assessments, intervention development and testing, and capacity building with communities that experience marginalization and the organizations that serve them.Jae Sevelius (they/them), is a Clinical Psychologist, Professor of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry) at Columbia University, and a Research Scientist at New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Sevelius’ research focuses on the role of gender affirmation in mental health and HIV-related health outcomes among transgender and gender expansive people. They work in collaboration with community-led research teams to develop and evaluate trauma-informed, gender-affirming health promotion interventions for transgender and gender expansive people in the United States and Brazil. Dr. Sevelius also specializes in psychedelic-assisted therapy for identity-based trauma and holds a Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Dr. Sevelius’ research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the California HIV/AIDS Research Program, as well as other public institutions and private foundations.

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Psychedelics are suddenly everywhere and are being touted as miracle cures for everything from trauma to headaches. With FDA approval of MDMA and psilocybin expected in the next year, this presentation will briefly review where we are in psychedelic research, how we got here, and what issues researchers and clinicians should be aware of moving forward. Particular attention will be paid to big-picture social justice issues, including equity and access, climate justice, racial and queer justice, and indigenous rights.

Caroline Dorsen, PhD, FNP-BC, FAAN (she/her) is Associate Dean for Clinical Partnerships at Rutgers University School of Nursing, where she is on the faculty of both the schools of nursing and public health. She is a scholar, educator, and family nurse practitioner whose passion is the intersection of health and social justice. For over 15 years her research, teaching and advocacy work has largely focused on the role of stigma, bias and discrimination in substance use and LGBTQ+ health disparities. Her current project is examining nurses’ attitudes towards psychedelic drug use as a healing modality.

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This presentation will provide an overview of the epidemiology of fentanyl-involved overdoses with xylazine detected and/ or co-involved. In addition, Drs. Kariisa and Rivera Blanco will discuss xylazine’s mechanism of action, background, clinical presentation, overdose and withdrawal management, and chronic use complications.

Dr. Mbabazi Kariisa is a Health Scientist in the Division of Overdose Prevention in CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and serves as a science officer focusing on mortality-related activities for CDC’s Overdose Data to Action program. Her work focuses mainly on drug overdose death surveillance and analysis of data from the State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System (SUDORS). Prior to joining NCIPC, she worked as an injury epidemiologist for the Ohio Department of Health in Columbus, Ohio where she focused on an array of injury-related topics. Dr. Kariisa received her PhD in Epidemiology from The Ohio State University and an MPH in International Health from the University of Michigan.

Dr. Liz Rivera Blanco is a Medical Toxicology Fellow from the Emory University/ CDC program, currently working in the Division of Overdose Prevention in CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC). Prior to joining DOP/NCIPC, she completed a 3- year residency in Emergency Medicine at St. Luke’s Episcopal Medical Center Ponce, Puerto Rico and medical school at Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara in Mexico.