2025 Addictions and Their Treatment Course

Dr. Batki is Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine and Chief of the AddictionRecovery Treatment Services (ARTS) at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Health Care System (SFVAHCS).

Dr. Batki directs the UCSF/SFVAHCS Addiction Research Program and is senior consultant to the UCSF/SFVAHCS Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship Program.Previously, he served as Director of the Division of Substance Abuse and Addiction Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital.

Dr. Batki works in addiction research, training, and clinical services. His research focuses on the pharmacological and neurobehavioral treatment of addiction and co-occurring psychiatric and medical disorders in Veterans. He has conducted VA, DoD, NIDA, and NIAAA-fundedresearchaimedto improve the treatment of cocaine, and methamphetamine use disorders as well as alcohol and opioid use disorders. Much of his work has focused on Veterans and other patients with co-occurring medical disorders such as HIV, Hepatitis C, and TB, and co-occurring psychiatric disorders including PTSD, serious mental illness, and the effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Petros Levounis, MD, MA, serves as professor and chair of the Department of Psychiatry and associate dean at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. He is also the chief of service at University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, director of the Northern New Jersey Medication Assisted Treatment Center of Excellence, and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Levounis came to Rutgers from Columbia University where he served as director of the Addiction Institute of New York from 2002 to 2013.

Dr. Levounis is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University where he studied chemistry and biophysics before receiving his medical education at Stanford University School of Medicine and the Medical College of Pennsylvania. During medical school, he researched the effects of social class on patient-physician relationships in Oxford, England, and received an MA degree in sociology from Stanford. In 1994, he moved to New York City to train in psychiatry at the New York State Psychiatric Institute of Columbia University. He graduated from Columbia earning the National Institute of Mental Health Outstanding Resident Award and went on to complete his fellowship in addiction psychiatry at New York University.

Dr. Levounis has written numerous articles, monographs, and book chapters; has lectured extensively on addiction topics throughout the United States and abroad; and has been interviewed by CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, FOX, The Martha Stewart Radio Show, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among others.

Dr. Levounis has served on the boards of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) and the American Board of Addiction Medicine, and from 2005 to 2009 chaired the national Committee on Addiction Treatment of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Dr. Levounis is a Betty Ford Scholar, a recipient of the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists’ Distinguished Service Award and the ASAM Educator of the Year Award, and a distinguished fellow of the APA and ASAM. In 2017, he was elected as an honorary member of the World Psychiatric Association.

Dr. Levounis has published fourteen books including the self-help paperback “Sober Siblings: How to Help Your Alcoholic Brother or Sister—and Not Lose Yourself,” the textbook of “Substance Dependence and Co-Occurring Psychiatric Disorders,” “Motivational Interviewing for Clinical Practice,” “The Behavioral Addictions,” “Becoming Mindful,” “LGBTQ Mental Health: The Spectrum of Gender and Sexuality,” “Office-Based Buprenorphine Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder,” now in its second edition, and “Technological Addictions.” Dr. Levounis is currently working on the first textbook of Nature Therapy, which is going to be available in 2023. His books have been translated into French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Dr. Levounis is married to actor Lukas Hassel and lives in New York City.

Dr. Michelle Lofwall, board-certified in psychiatry and addiction medicine, is a Professor in the Departments of Behavioral Science and Psychiatry and the Bell Alcohol and Addictions Endowed Chair at the University of Kentucky (UK). She received her bachelors degree from Northwestern University in Psychology and her MD and Masters in Pathology from Chicago Medical School. She completed internship, psychiatry residency, and a fellowship in behavioral pharmacology from Johns Hopkins University. Currently, she is the medical director of UK’s Robert Straus and First Bridge Clinics, which provide comprehensive opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment within the UK Center on Drug and Alcohol Research. Her passion is in improving the care of patients with addiction, and her research has included evaluation of novel treatments for opioid use disorder (e.g., buprenorphine implants and depot injections), physician training, understanding factors associated with buprenorphine diversion, and improving care of complex patients with OUD and deep-seated infections. She was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) and the American Psychiatric Association, is a past ASAM board member and co-director of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry’s annual addiction treatment review course. She has received numerous teaching and mentoring awards and was an expert panel member for SAMHSA’s Treatment Improvement Protocol on Medication Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder and invited speaker to the National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. David Marcovitz is a board-certified general and addiction psychiatrist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Director of the Division of Addiction Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He helped launch the Vanderbilt University Hospital Addiction Consult Service and transitional outpatient Bridge Clinic at VUMC. He also serves as the Principal Investigator for the state-funded Middle TN Opioid Addiction Treatment Hub at Vanderbilt. While completing his addiction psychiatry fellowship at Partners Healthcare / Harvard Medical School, he also worked as a staff psychiatrist receiving additional mentored training in collaborative care in the IMPACT Model at Partners Healthcare in Boston, MA. He is an experienced educator, delivering formal and informal didactics on various addiction-related topics to medical students, residents, fellows and colleagues. He has served as the senior trainer for Tennessee supporting the federally-funded Opioid Response Network to help build addiction treatment capacity across TN. Dr. Marcovitz’ teaching at the regional and national level has focused on models of collaborative care with internal medicine and other specialties and disciplines in addiction treatment in both the inpatient and outpatient setting. He has also presented at national meetings on novel teaching methods and outcome measures in addiction psychiatry. He has published on addiction education methods as well as research at the intersection of treatment of opioid addiction and community mutual help. Dr. Marcovitz serves on the board of directors for the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry (AAAP).

More information can be found here: https://www.vumc.org/psychiatry/person/david-marcovitz-md

Carla Marienfeld, MD, DFAPA, FASAM is board-certified in psychiatry, addiction psychiatry, and addiction medicine, and she is a Clinical Professor at the University of California San Diego who supports recovery in an evidence based, harm-reduction approach through motivational interviewing and medication treatment. She is Medical Director for the UC San Diego Substance Treatment and Recovery (STAR) program. Her research involves populations with substance use disorders, including pregnant women and the development of their offspring, often using analysis of electronic medical record data. She has authored over three dozen peer reviewed articles, book chapters, practice guidelines, and invited commentaries, and she edited two books: Motivational Interviewing for Clinical Practice and Absolute Addiction Psychiatry Review: An essential board exam study guide. She has a record of grant funding for research and founding the UCSD Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship Program, where she serves as Program Director. She has been highly involved in the education of colleagues and trainees about addiction psychiatry, buprenorphine treatment, and motivational interviewing. Dr. Marienfeld completed a fellowship in addiction psychiatry and residency training in psychiatry at Yale. During her residency, she was chief resident of psychiatry and founded (and later led as junior faculty) the Yale Global Mental Health Program. She earned a medical degree with honors from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She is active in many professional organizations, including the American Society of Addiction Medicine, the American Association of Addiction Psychiatry, and the American Psychiatric Association.

Dr. Sanchit Maruti, MD, MS is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont. He is also an Attending Psychiatrist and Medical Director of the In-patient Psychiatry Service at the University of Vermont Medical Center. His clinical focus is on working with acutely ill patients and those with co-occurring disorders. His research interests are in the areas of risk assessment and quality improvement. He is the Course Director of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry (AAAP) Addictions and their Treatments Course and serves on the Board of Directors for the AAAP.

Dr. Nunes is Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), Principal Investigator (multiple PI) of the Greater New York node of the NIDA Clinical Trials Network (CTN), and a practicing psychiatrist Board Certified in Addiction Psychiatry and Addiction Medicine. He has devoted his career to research on the treatment of cocaine, opioid and other substance use disorders and is nationally and internationally recognized for his work on the evaluation and treatment of co-occurring depression, alcohol, cocaine and opioid use disorders and the development of pharmacological and behavioral treatments for substance use disorders as well as his work in the Clinical Trials Network testing the effectiveness of behavioral and pharmacological treatments in community-based treatment settings. Dr. Nunes has extensive experience with research on comorbidity of substance and psychiatric disorders, including co-occurring mood, anxiety disorders and ADHD. He also has extensive experience on the effectiveness and implementation portions of the translational spectrum, including leadership of two large multisite clinical trials in the clinical trials network, one of a computer-delivered behavioral therapy for substance use disorders (Campbell, Nunes et al., 2014) which served as the pivotal trial leading to FDA approval as a digital therapeutic, and one on treatment of opioid use disorder with XR-NTX vs buprenorphine (Lee, Nunes et al., 2019). He has extensive experience mentoring fellows and junior faculty, having recently completed two funding periods of a NIDA-funded K24 with emphasis on mentoring at NYSPI/CUMC.

Dr. Renner is Professor of Psychiatry, Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. He Graduated from Yale University and Case University School of Medicine and Completed his Psychiatric Residency at the Tufts- New England Medical Center. In 1969, Dr. Renner Served as a Psychiatrist with the US Navy in Vietnam, and since 1979 he has been working at the Boston VA in their Outpatient Addiction Treatment Program. In addition to his clinical activities at the VA, he is Associate Director of the Boston University Medical Center General Psychiatry Residency Program and Associate Director of their Addiction Psychiatry Residency. Dr. Renner has written and lectured extensively on the Treatment of Alcoholism and Drug Addiction. He is a member and former Chair of the American Psychiatric Association Council on Addiction Psychiatry, former Chair of the APA Council on Adult Psychiatry and former Chair of the APA Expert Advisory Panel on Addiction Psychiatry. In 2018, Dr. Renner Co-Edited the 2nd Edition of the APA Handbook of Office-Based Buprenorphine Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder. He is Past-President of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry, and a Member of the Data Safety Monitoring Board for the Clinical Trials Network of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a Consultant to the Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, and a member of the faculty of the Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Ries is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Washington School of Medicine, in Seattle, Washington. He is board certified in General Psychiatry and in Addiction Psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and certified in Addiction Medicine by the American Board of Addiction Medicine. Dr. Ries is Director of the Addictions Programs at Harborview Medical Center in downtown Seattle and Director of the Division of Addictions for the Department of Psychiatry. He was chosen to chair the first national consensus Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP#9) and TIP #42 on assessment and treatment of persons with co-occurring addiction and mental disorders by the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. Dr Ries was senior editor of the Key reference text ASAM’s Principles of Addiction Medicine editions 4 and 5. He is currently working on several NIDA, NIAAA, and DOD sponsored grants in the area of addictions treatment and addiction and suicide. His CV includes more than 150 published papers in peer reviewed journals.

Dr. Sevarino earned his MD, CM at McGill Faculty of Medicine and PhD 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 tract 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 consulting psychiatrist to Gaylord Hospital, Wallingford from 1999 – 2009, and again 2017-2023. He now works as per diem psychiatrist at Hartford Healthcare – Rushford. His particular expertise is in treatment of the dually-diagnosed and non-opiate pharmacological management of chronic pain. He is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, 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 – 2015. He currently co-directs AAAP’s Advanced Addiction Psychopharmacology course.

Dr. Westreich is a board-certified addiction psychiatrist who specializes in the forensic evaluation of addicted persons. After graduating from Northwestern University with a degree in English Literature, he received his medical degree from the University of Minnesota School Of Medicine. Following an internship in Internal Medicine at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Dr. Westreich completed a residency in General Psychiatry at New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center, and a fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine/Bellevue Hospital. He is board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in general psychiatry, addiction psychiatry, and forensic psychiatry. Dr. Westreich is Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry in the Division of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, Department of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine and serves as Consultant on Behavioral Health and Addiction to the Commissioner of Major League Baseball. He is licensed as a Medical Review Officer (M.R.O.), and is the author of Helping the Addict You Love (Simon and Schuster), A Parents Guide to Teen Addiction (Skyhorse Publishing), and is a co-author of Addiction and the Law (APA Press).

Jill M. Williams, MD, is Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Division of Addiction Psychiatry at the Rutgers University-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick. She also holds faculty appointments at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey and the Rutgers Center for Alcohol Studies. The focus of Dr. Williams work has been in addressing tobacco in individuals with mental illness or other addictions through treatment and systems interventions. She is Medical Director for the TCTTAC Program in NYC, in collaboration with Center for Practice Innovation at Columbia University. In 2015 she was the recipient of the Remarkable Achievement Award of the NJ Psychiatric Association. She is past Chair and current member of the APA Council on Addiction Psychiatry.