TRI Treatment Research Institute: Science Over Addiction

SENIOR TRI INVESTIGATORS AND ADMINISTRATORS

Center on Evidence Based Interventions for Crime and Addiction

Steven Belenko, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Co-Director, is a senior scientist at TRI, and adjunct Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Over the past 25 years, Dr. Belenko has established a national reputation for his work on substance abuse and treatment in the criminal justice system. Dr. Belenko has conducted extensive research on substance abuse and crime; treatment integration in criminal justice settings, including drug courts, diversion programs, and correctional facilities; and HIV service needs and barriers to service delivery for offenders. He is a well-known expert on drug courts, dating back to their emergence in the late 1980s, and has published extensively on their design, impact, delivery models, and linkages to health services. He has collaborated extensively with officials and staff of state and local criminal justice agencies (jail and prison systems, courts, probation, and parole) as well as community-based treatment providers and other service agencies. Dr. Belenko’s prior work in Evidence Based Practices includes as workgroup leader for the recently released CSAT TIP Substance Abuse Treatment for Adults in the Criminal Justice System, as principal advisor for the Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Coordinating Group, and as reviewer for NREPP.

Harry K. Wexler, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Co-Director, is a Senior Principal Investigator in the Center for the Integration of Research & Practice at the National Developmental Institutes, Inc. (NDRI). During the last 35 years Wexler achieved a national reputation in the areas of substance abuse policy, treatment and research. His research demonstrating the effectiveness of prison treatment with aftercare has had considerable impact on the field and been influential in efforts to expand prison drug treatment by state and federal policy makers. Dr. Wexler currently serves as Senior PI for the Criminal Justice Drug Abuse Treatment Studies (CJ-DATS) , a multi-site cooperative research program testing treatment models for incarcerated individuals with substance use disorders, including both treatment in jail or prison and treatment as part of re-entry into the community. Dr. Wexler has also done significant work in the areas of HIV/AIDS prevention, gender treatment issues, stigma reduction and co-occurring disorders among offenders; provided consultantion for many local, state and federal agencies; is active in many professional organizations; and, has served as the Co-Chair of the recently released CSAT TIP “Substance Abuse Treatment for Adults in the Criminal Justice System” summarizing what is known about evidence-based substance abuse treatment in criminal justice.

A. Thomas McLellan, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of TRI. He is nationally and internationally recognized for his more than 30 years of research on substance abuse treatment outcomes. His work has also promoted better understanding of the factors that lead to treatment success, and has fostered greater understanding of addiction as a chronic illness, reduced its stigma, and provided means for earlier identification and prevention. He has published more than 400 articles and chapters on addiction research and serves as Editor in Chief of the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment. He has served as an advisor to numerous government and nonprofit scientific organizations, including the Office of National Drug Control Policy; the National Practice Laboratory of the American Psychiatric Association; and the World Health Organization. Dr. McLellan's many honors and awards include the Life Achievement Award of the American Society of Addiction Medicine in 2003, the prestigious Okey Honorary Lecture Award by the British Medical Society in 2003; in 2004 he was named Innovator of the Year by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Center for Policy Analysis and Research

Mady Chalk, Ph.D., Director: Dr. Chalk has more than twenty years experience in addiction and mental health treatment, policy and research. In the federal government she was Director of the Division for Services Improvement in the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment in SAMHSA, and for a period of time was Director of its Office of Managed Care. Chalk is an expert in the organization and financing of treatment systems in both the public and private sectors – and in the policies that govern treatment delivery. She was architect of the Target Cities and the State-wide Screening, Brief Interventions and Referral to Treatment programs. With the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as partner, she led the Network for Improvement of Addiction Treatment, the first program to promote better treatment access and broader service availability through implementation of best practices. She was also responsible for linking the Addiction Technology Transfer Centers with NIH to foster dissemination and adoption of evidence based practices in the treatment field.

Jack Kemp, M.S. is Senior Policy Associate at the Treatment Research Institute and former Director of Substance Abuse Services for the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health (DSAMH. He has over 34 years of experience in the field of addictions, mainly in senior management positions in Delaware and New York. As SSA Director in Delaware, he redesigned and restructured the statewide substance abuse treatment system, and introduced a performance based contracting model that connects payment to performance. He served as Executive Leader for the Robert Wood Johnson/CSAT Network for the Improvement of Treatment (NIATx) State Pilot to improve access and retention in treatment throughout the state, and for the RWJF Advancing Recovery grant to implement evidence based practices. Mr. Kemp also is the Principal Investigator, in collaboration with TRI, for a NIDA grant on Statewide Science-Based Concurrent Recovery Monitoring in Delaware, and formerly served as the Director of the Treatment Access Center (TASC), overseeing a statewide program that provided liaison between the substance abuse treatment and criminal justice systems. He is a member of the Washington Circle group, serving on its Policy and Public Sector committees. His educational background includes an M.S. degree in Educational Counseling from the University of Scranton, and post-graduate training at the Alfred Adler Institute of Psychoanalysis in New York City. He is currently enrolled in the MALS (Master of Arts in Liberal Studies) graduate program at the University of Delaware.

Sean Haley, Ph.D. has spent the last twenty years working in community health, government and higher education. His community health experience began as a youth outreach worker in public housing in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He has held positions in the Massachusetts Governor’s Alliance against Drugs, Massachusetts Department of Public Health as a co-manager of the MA Prevention Center System, Director of Adolescent Health for a large New England non profit and as the Executive Director for a small education non-profit, the latter while completing his doctoral work. Dr. Haley has served as a consultant for numerous projects including co-coordinator of the Washtenaw County AIDS Task Force in Ypsilanti, Michigan; a senior trainer at the Multi-Cultural Aids Coalition, as co-author of Massachusetts multi-agency substance abuse prevention plan and as the program officer at the Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Foundation. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Brandeis University and Salem State College. He holds a Masters of Public Health from the University of Michigan in policy and administration with a concentration in maternal and child health, and a Ph.D. in Health and Social Policy from Brandeis University.

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