Grantee Honors

John Fitzgerald's dissertation based on CTN 0008 data received Division 55 of the American Psychological Association Patrick DeLeon Prize for Outstanding Student Contribution to the Advancement of Pharmacotherapy at the 2007 APA Annual Meeting in August. John Fitzgerald conducted a secondary analysis of the Baseline workforce and treatment unit data for his dissertation in System Science: Social Psychology at Portland State University. The analysis used HLM to assess individual and organizational influences on staff attitudes toward naltrexone, methadone and buprenorphine. Patrick DeLeon invited him to prepare the analysis for publication and to submit it to the journal he edits: Psychological Services.

Dr. Erik Gunderson received the 2007 Ambulatory Medicine Teacher of the Year Award from the Department of Medicine at Columbia University. The award was based in part from his development of a curriculum on recognition of prescription opioid use disorders and for involvement of medical residents in his clinical research on buprenorphine treatment of opioid dependence in primary care.

Dr. Leonard Jason at DePaul University was recently recognized as the fourth most productive clinical psychology researcher during the five-year period spanning 2000 to 2004 in an article by P.K. Stewart, Y.P. Wu & M.C. Roberts entitled Top producers of scholarly publications in clinical psychology PhD Programs in the 2007 Journal of Clinical Psychology, 63(12), 1209-1215. During this period Dr. Jason published 87 articles.

Dr. Ellen Rose Meara of Harvard University has recently been named to the Institute of Medicine Committee on Smoking Cessation in Military and Veteran Populations'.

Dr. Kevin Oschsner, Columbia University, received the Young Investigator Award in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco, CA, April 13, 2008.

The CTN Northern New England Node is pleased to announce that Dr. Jennifer Sharpe Potter has received a 5-year Career Development Award (K23) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Dr. Potter will focus on the important overlap between pain and addiction, with the ultimate goal of developing and studying a treatment approach for substance-dependent patients with chronic pain.

The Oregon/Hawaii Node is pleased to report that Traci Rieckmann, Ph.D., has received a K23 award for a CTN platform study - Adoption of Evidence-Based Practices in Substance Abuse Treatment. The award supports four years of training and career development activities plus research on adoption of evidence-based treatments.

José Szapocznik, Ph.D., has been named chairman of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Miller School of Medicine. Dr. Szapocznik also serves as associate dean for community development and director of the Center for Family Studies at the Miller School. He is considered a pioneer in the national effort to prevent and treat adolescent drug abuse and other behavior problems among Hispanic youth. Dr. Szapocznik's Brief Strategic Family Therapy(TM) has received national and international recognition for its success as a family-based intervention.

Dr. Patrick Tolan of the University of Illinois at Chicago received the 2007 Star of Science Award from the Children's Brain Research Foundation.

Dr. Patrick Tolan of the University of Illinois Chicago gave the Allen L. Edwards Lecture at the University of Washington in February 2007, entitled, "The Promise of Current Scientific Knowledge about Child and Adolescent Conduct Problems."

The Center for Drug Free Living (CFDFL), a community treatment program in the Florida Node, has been awarded a $100,000 Blue Foundation grant. The funds will be used to establish and provide infrastructure support for a regional hepatitis care consortium (HepCaN).

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has named Homeward Bound, Inc., a Texas not-for-profit substance abuse treatment agency in the CTN, as one of six awardees under its Advancing Recovery program.

Congratulations go to Residence XII, a women's treatment program in Kirkland, Washington, a CTP member of the Pacific Northwest Node. The agency has been selected to receive the James W. West, M.D., Quality Improvement Award from the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers (NAATP). The award is given annually to one or more member programs to recognize their efforts in the area of quality improvement.