John P. McGovern Award for Excellence in Medical Education
Jeanette M. Tetrault, MD, FACP, FASAM
Dr. Tetrault is a Professor of Medicine and Public Health, Vice- Chief for Education for the Section of General Internal Medicine, Associate Director for Training and Education for the Program in Addiction Medicine, and Addiction Medicine Fellowship Director at Yale School of Medicine. Her scholarly work focuses on care of patients with addiction and the medical conditions associated with substance use, mainly HIV and Hepatitis C. For over 15 years, Dr. Tetrault has served as a staff physician at the Central Medical Unit of the APT Foundation – a large, open access addiction treatment center in New Haven, CT. At Yale New Haven hospital, she cares for patients on the general medical teaching service and on the Yale Addiction Medicine Consult Service. She has been recognized for her teaching and mentorship being awarded the New England Regional Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) Clinician Educator of the Year Award in 2013, The W. Anderson Spickard Award for Excellence in Mentorship by the Association of Multidisciplinary Education and Research in Substance use and Addiction (AMSERSA) in 2018, and the American Society of Addiction Medicine Training Directors Award in 2021. In 2017, she was recognized as a Macy Foundation Faculty Scholar for her work in creating an interprofessional curriculum in substance use and addiction at Yale. She is passionate about curriculum development and has collaborated on educational projects locally, nationally, and internationally. She currently serves as president of the American College of Academic Addiction Medicine (ACAAM) and is a past-president of the New England Region of SGIM.
Betty Ford Award
Mishka Terplan, MD, MPH, FACOG, DFASAM
Mishka Terplan is board certified in both obstetrics and gynecology and in addiction medicine. His primary clinical, research, public health, and advocacy interests lie along the intersections of reproductive and behavioral health. He is Medical Director at Friends Research Institute and adjunct faculty at the University of California, San Francisco where he is a Substance Use Warmline clinician. Dr. Terplan has active grant funding and has published extensively on health inequities, discrimination, and access to treatment and is internationally recognized as an expert in the care of pregnant and parenting people with substance use disorder.. He has spoken at local high schools and before the United States Congress and has participated in federal and international expert panels primarily on issues related to gender, reproduction, and addiction.
W. Anderson Spickard, Jr. Excellence in Mentorship Award
Jane M. Liebschutz, MD, MPH, FACP
Dr. Liebschutz is a primary care and addiction medicine physician, substance use researcher, educator, and administrator. She is Professor of Medicine, Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Falk Chair in Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC. Her research agenda focuses on prevention and treatment of opioid use disorders, including safe opioid prescribing for pain and disseminating treatments for opioid use disorders in non-specialty medical settings. She is a national lecturer and educator on opioid prescribing. She has been a certified buprenorphine prescriber since 2006, managing an active panel of opioid-dependent patients within her primary care practice and serving as inpatient addiction medicine consultant. She advocates for harm reduction and is passionate about physician wellness.
New Investigator Award
Zoe M. Weinstein, MD, MS
Dr. Weinstein is an Assistant Professor at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and board certified in Internal Medicine and Addiction Medicine. She has been the Director of Boston Medical Center’s interdisciplinary addiction consult service since July 2016. She has been a co-investigator on multiple NIDA studies to deliver training and technical assistance to interdisciplinary addiction teams. She is currently site-PI of two NIDA Clinical Trial Network studies focused on inpatient addiction care. Her clinical and research work are also focused on long-term Office-Based Addiction Treatment (OBAT) with buprenorphine. She currently serves as an Associate Director of Boston Medical Center’s Grayken Addiction Medicine Fellowship Program, a board member of AMERSA and is a site medical director of a Boston methadone clinic.
David C. Lewis, MD Service to AMERSA Award
Maryann Amodeo, PhD, MSW, LICSW
Dr. Amodeo has more than 30 years of experience in the addiction field as a clinician, educator and researcher. She served on the AMERSA Board of Directors for eight years, was AMERSA president from 2003-2005, and has held other leadership roles in the organization. Reflecting her commitment to multidisciplinary training, she designed and directed the BU Postgraduate Certificate Program in Alcohol and Drug Abuse for social workers, psychologists, physicians and other health professionals; 275 completed the program over a 15-year period. For several years, she was an instructor for the Chief Resident Immersion Training Program (CRIT), sponsored by the BU School of Medicine. Her research, funded by NIDA, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, SAMHSA and local foundations, includes use of evidence-based practices in addiction treatment, the effects of parental addiction on children, and cross-cultural issues in alcohol and drug use. She has received national awards for integrating addiction skills into the social work curriculum. In 2016 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.
Marianne Marcus Nursing Award
Laura Starbird, PhD, MS, RN
Dr. Laura Starbird is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in the Department of Family and Community Health and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. Dr. Starbird’s research focuses on real-world implementation and the economic implications of interventions at the intersection of substance use, HIV, and women’s health. Her work, informed by experience as a public health nurse, seeks to improve the way organizations deliver care to marginalized communities rather than placing the burden on the individual patient.
Workshop Winners
2023 Best Workshop Award (awarded to a workshop presented at the 2023 conference)
Each year, AMERSA’s annual conference is enriched by our colleagues who share their work and expertise through workshop presentations. Workshops are designed to be longer than a didactic or research abstract presentation, specifically so that presenters can innovate with teaching methods, and participants have the opportunity to develop and practice new skills to utilize in their workplaces. We feel very fortunate to have so many people each year willing to invest their time and energy in bringing workshop presentations to the program!
The “Best Workshop” award is determined each year based on participant reviews. Congratulations to the winners of AMERSA’s 2023 Best Workshop award:
“I’m So Glad You’re Here:” Harm Reduction Wound Care for Xylazine and Injection-Related Wounds in Low Barrier and Street Based Settings
Raagini Jawa MD, MPH, FASAM
Raagini Jawa is an Assistant Professor and Clinician Investigator at the Center for Research on Health Care at the University of Pittsburgh who studies harm reduction implementation in health settings. Clinically she is an Infectious Disease, and Addiction Medicine physician and a wound care provider at Prevention Point Pittsburgh.
Rebecca A. Hosey, MSN, MPH, CRNP
Rebecca A. Hosey is a nurse and public health professional from Philadelphia, PA. She recently graduated as a fellow of the inaugural cohort of the Leonard A. Lauder Community Care Nurse Practitioner Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, while working as a nurse researcher in a mobile MOUD clinic, an abortion clinic nurse, and a wound care nurse with Prevention Point Philadelphia. Much of her recent work involves teaching others (patients and professionals) about xylazine associated wounds, as well as harm-reduction based methods to care for people who use drugs. She recently began a new role with Delaware Valley Community Health in Philadelphia working as a Family Nurse Practitioner providing primary care as well as expanding their wound care offerings and supporting the expansion of their MOUD clinic.
Rachel McFadden, MPH BSN BA
Rachel McFadden is a nurse in a community-based harm reduction wound care clinic and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania Emergency Department. As a Bloomberg Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, her work centers on reducing stigma, strengthening the hospital’s capacity to respond to the substance use crisis through the integration of harm reduction, and bridging hospital services to community-based and public health efforts.
Ashish P Thakrar, MD MS
Ashish Thakrar is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. He is an internist and an addiction medicine specialist. Dr. Thakrar’s research focuses on expanding and adapting evidence-based treatment for opioid use disorder in the era of fentanyl and other synthetic drugs. He works clinically as a hospital-based addiction consult physician and as an outpatient primary care and addiction treatment physician
Rachel Neuschatz, MSN, RN, CWCN
Rachel Neuschatz is the Harm Reduction Wound Care Field Nurse for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health in the Division of Substance Use Prevention and Harm Reduction. They bring experience working in community clinic, hospital, home, and street-based settings to this role, created to respond to the current increase in substance use associated wounds. In addition to providing direct care in the community, they offer harm reduction wound care training and education, and are involved in efforts to strengthen collaboration amongst those providing care for people with wounds in varied settings.
Stephanie Klipp, RN, CARN, CAAP
Stephanie Klipp is a registered nurse with addiction training. She works in community health nursing delivering overdose prevention and street-based wound care. She is guided by her lived experience and remains passionate about meeting patients where they are (literally and figuratively) with compassion and non-judgement. She uses her outreach efforts as a way to improve patients experiences with health care workers and the healthcare system.
Abstract Award Winners
Best Research Abstract Award
Elizabeth A. Samuels, MD, MPH, MHS
Dr. Samuels is an emergency medicine physician, health services trained researcher, and Associate Professor-In-Residence at the UCLA Department of Emergency Medicine. She completed her emergency medicine training at the Brown Emergency Medicine Residency Program, where she served as Chief Resident, a health service research and health policy fellowship at the Yale National Clinician Scholars Program, and is board certified in Emergency Medicine and Addiction Medicine. Her work focuses on implementation and evaluation of emergency department-based social emergency medicine, harm reduction, addiction, and health equity initiatives.
Best Research Abstract Award – Runner Up
Gerald Cochran, MSW, PhD
Gerald (Jerry) Cochran is an Associate Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Epidemiology at the University of Utah and serves as the Director of Research for the Program on Addiction Research, Clinical Care, Knowledge, and Advocacy within the Division of Epidemiology. He also has an adjunct Associate Professor appointment with the University of Utah Department of Psychiatry and is core faculty with the Informatics, Decision-Enhancement, and Analytic Sciences (IDEAS) Center of Innovation within the VA Salt Lake City Health Care System.
Dr. Cochran’s area of expertise involves identifying and studying appropriate care for underserved populations in health care settings, with particular emphasis on individuals who use drugs and alcohol. He has extensive expertise in clinical- and system-level behavioral health services research. Dr. Cochran’s work has focused on development and testing of evidence-based practices for addressing opioid and other substance use in health care settings. Dr. Cochran’s work aims to improve substance use prevention and treatment services.
The John Nelson Chappel Best Curriculum, Quality Improvement and Program Abstract Award
Raagini Jawa MD, MPH, FASAM
Dr. Jawa is an Assistant Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine and a clinician investigator in the Center for Research on Health Care at the University of Pittsburgh. She is board certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Disease and Addiction Medicine. Dr. Jawa’s research focuses on the intersection of Infectious Disease and Addiction, including studying how to optimize integration of harm reduction services for individuals with substance use disorders within traditional health settings, developing multidisciplinary provider-facing interventions to prevent, diagnose, and treat infectious and non-infections complications of drug use. Clinically, she provides office-based addiction treatment in IM Recovery Engagement Program and is consulting specialist on the Endovascular Infection Service at UPMC.
Stephen Murray, MPH, NRP
Stephen Murray, MPH, NRP, is an overdose researcher, Harm Reduction Program Manager and the Director of the Massachusetts Overdose Prevention Helpline at Boston Medical Center. In 2021, he retired as a Lieutenant at a large regional ambulance service in Western Massachusetts, and had served as a first responder since 2013, having worked both as a firefighter and paramedic. He regularly shares for a national audience about his lived experience as a person who used drugs and overdose survivor. Stephen provides expert technical assistance around the topics of overdose prevention, emergency medical services and harm reduction to a variety of organizations, county and state governments across the country. He has guest lectured at Northeastern University, UMASS Medical School, Bennington College, Boston University, Temple University and Ohio State University, and has had work published in the American Journal of Public Health and Health Promotion Practice. In September 2023, he was featured in Episode 809 (“The Call”) on This American Life.
The John Nelson Chappel Best Curriculum, Quality Improvement and Program Abstract Award – Runner Up
Brianna Norton DO, MPH
Dr. Brianna Norton is an associate professor of medicine in the Divisions of General Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Her clinical work includes the treatment of HCV, HIV, and opioid use disorder. She conducts research to improve linkage to HCV care and treatment for people who inject drugs. She is also the medical director of OnPoint, an overdose prevention center, in East Harlem.