Prescribers: Introductory Curriculum on Alcohol Use Disorder and Medications for Alcohol Use Disorders

Shawn Cohen, MD, FASAM is an Instructor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine whose primary clinical responsibilities are on the Yale Addiction Medicine Consult Service. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Addiction Medicine. He has an interest in improving care in the hospital for people who use drugs, low barrier outpatient care, and low dose initiation of buprenorphine.

Tessa Steel, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor, physician-scientist, and Pulmonary Critical Care Medicine doctor at Harborview Medical Center, a county safety-net hospital operated by the University of Washington in Seattle. She is board-certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Medicine, and Critical Care Medicine. Her clinical and research interests include improving hospital-based treatments for alcohol withdrawal syndrome and using hospitalizations to help people with addiction launch their process of recovery.

Alyssa Peterkin, MD is an Instructor of Medicine Boston University School of Medicine and an internist at Boston Medical Center. Currently, she also serves as an associate program director for Grayken Addiction Medicine fellowship. She spends her clinical time working as a hospitalist, attending on the inpatient addiction consultation service and working in the substance use disorder urgent care. Her interests include educating learners at all levels and expanding access to addiction treatment.

Melissa Weimer, DO, MCR, FASAM is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Addiction Medicine. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Public Health and Associate Program Director of the Addiction Medicine Fellowship at Yale University. She is an expert in hospital-based care for patients with substance use disorders and has worked with colleagues to develop successful hospital-based Addiction Medicine Consult Services at both Oregon Health & Science University and Yale University/Yale New Haven Hospital. Dr. Weimer is also a national leader in Addiction Medicine education and has developed curricula for substance use disorder evaluation and treatment and safe and effective pain treatment. Dr. Weimer serves on the national board of ASAM and is the Chair of the ASAM Clinical Practice Guidelines Methodology and Oversight Committee.

Dr. Sevarino earned his M.D., C.M. at McGill Faculty of Medicine and Ph.D. in molecular biology at the University of Connecticut Health Center. After an internship in Internal medicine, he trained in psychiatry in the dual clinical/basic research track at the Yale University School of Medicine. For six years thereafter, he was PI on NIH grants examining neurobiological mechanisms underlying cocaine dependence, and since then has transitioned to being a clinician-educator who remained active in clinical research as a member of the MIRECC VA Team in studies examining new treatments for substance use disorders. He was Medical Director of the Newington Mental Health Care Firm, Connecticut VA Healthcare System, from Dec. 2004 through Aug. 2017. He was a consulting psychiatrist at Gaylord Hospital, Wallingford, from 1999 to 2009, and again from 2017 to 2023. He now works as a per diem psychiatrist at Hartford Healthcare – Rushford. His particular expertise is in the treatment of the dually-diagnosed and non-opiate pharmacological management of chronic pain. He is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine. He was subspecialty certified in Psychosomatic Medicine by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology from 2009 – 2019, in Addiction Medicine by the American Board of Addiction Medicine from 2010 – 2020, and currently in Addiction Medicine by the American Board of Preventative Medicine. Dr. Sevarino serves as Medical Director for the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry (AAAP), and is a past president of that organization. He was Course Director for the AAAP Board Review Course in Addictions, which developed into the Addictions and Their Treatment Course, from 2007 to 2015. He currently co-directs AAAP’s Advanced Addiction Psychopharmacology course.

Christine Harsell DNP, ANP-BC is a nurse practitioner and medical director at an FQHC in North Dakota. She oversees an integrated primary care setting that provides substance use disorder (SUD) services including medications for alcohol use disorder. She works regionally to offer SBIRT and Medications for Addiction Treatment (MAT) implementation training and technical assistance and has been a content expert and case presenter on a variety of Project ECHO sessions related to SUD.  

Dale Walaszek is a Physician Associate who works in Soldotna, Alaska at a hospital based Behavioral Health Department providing addiction medicine care. The services provided include acute detox, MOUD/MAUD, and primary health care. Coaching clients who struggle with addictions has been both the most challenging and rewarding experience of Dale's 27 year career.

Carolyn Swenson provides consultation, training, and coaching on substance use and suicide prevention, and motivational interviewing. She completed master’s degrees in nursing and public health and is a certified Question-Persuade-Refer (QPR) suicide prevention trainer. Her past work includes perinatal and pediatric nursing; public health nursing with migrant farmworkers and on the Navajo reservation, and refugee relief work in Sudan; epidemiology research; and quality improvement with clinics, hospitals, and public health departments. Born and raised in Minnesota, she now resides in Denver, Colorado. 

Dr. Dowton is the Director of Addiction Medicine at Hartford Hospital. She directs the inpatient Addiction Medicine Consult Service at Hartford Hospital and provides care to patients with substance use disorders who are admitted to the acute care setting. She holds dual board-certification in Internal Medicine from the American Board of Internal Medicine and Addiction Medicine from the American Board of Preventative Medicine.

Dr. Dowton received her medical degree from Tufts University School of Medicine and then completed her Internal Medicine residency at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, MA. After residency, she completed the Addiction Medicine Fellowship at Yale School of Medicine.

She is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine.

Alyssa Falleni, PharmD, is a clinical pharmacist who received her Doctorate of Pharmacy from the University of Rhode Island. She recently completed a two-year fellowship in Health Professions Education, Evaluation, and Research in Substance Use Disorders and Related Harms at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. She holds a clinical instructor appointment at the Yale School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and works as an outpatient HIV Pharmacist at Hartford Healthcare, Connecticut. Her research and clinical interests are in improving medication access for people who use substances and identifying and addressing social determinants of health.

Joshua D. Lee MD, MSc is a Professor in the departments of Population Health and Medicine/General Internal Medicine and Clinical Innovation at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He is Director of the NYU Fellowship in Addiction Medicine and Co-Director of DPH’s Section on Tobacco, Alcohol, and Drug Use. He is a clinician-researcher focused on addiction pharmacotherapies in primary care and criminal justice populations and leads the NYUGSOM Hub of the NIDA Justice and Community Opioid Innovation Network. He is a Science Advisor at Oar Health, an alcohol treatment provider. 

Dr. Lara Ray received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Ray completed a predoctoral clinical internship at Brown University Medical School, where she stayed for a postdoctoral fellowship at the Brown University Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies. After her postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Ray joined the faculty at the UCLA Clinical Psychology Program, where she is now a Full Professor. Dr. Ray also has academic appointments at the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and the UCLA Brain Research Institute. Dr. Ray has an active program of research on the clinical neuroscience of addiction. Her laboratory combines experimental psychopharmacology with behavioral genetic and neuroimaging methods to ascertain the mechanisms underlying addictive disorders in humans and apply these insights to treatment development. Dr. Ray has over 250 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters. Her program of research is funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) as well as the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Dr. Ray has received research excellence awards from the American Psychological Association (APA), the Research Society on Alcoholism (RSA), and the American College on Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP).

Dr. Anton is a Distinguished University Professor and senior investigator with over 25 years of research experience. He is considered an international expert in biologic markers of alcohol use as well as in new treatments for alcohol use disorders (AUD's), as evidenced by conducting over 15 clinical trials. He participated in PROJECT Match as well as being the chair of the COMBINE Study and first author of its publication in JAMA. His team also developed one of he first fMRI alcohol cue tasks showing activation in salient brain reward systems that could be blocked by medications. As a current holder of a Senior Scientist Career and Mentoring Award (K05) he has used that support to integrate genetics and neuroimaging into his clinical trial work. His group has begun to bring together the brain-imaging paradigm with genetics and pharmacogenetics, providing the best technology available to investigate alcohol effects on the human brain as they relate to alcoholism vulnerability and treatment.

Dr. Carolyn Chan is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine, internist and addiction medicine physician at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. She currently is the Program Director of the UC Addiction Medicine Fellowship. Clinically she spends her time on inpatient addiction consult service, outpatient integrated primary care and addiction clinic, and precepts internal medicine residents. She is the co-host of The Curbsiders Addiction Medicine Podcast, which disseminates evidence-based addiction practices to a broad audience. Her scholarly work focuses on addiction education and the use of medical improvisation to teach communication skills.