Conference Organizers

• Jane Tillman, PhD, ABPP - Austen Riggs Center Evelyn Stefansson Nef Director of the Erikson Institute for Education, Research, and Advocacy
• Linda Mayes, PhD - Arnold Gesell Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Psychology in the Yale Child Study Center

Moderators

• Nancy Close, PhD, Associate Director of the Yale Program on Early Childhood Education 
• Daniel Knauss, PsyD, ABPP, Director of Training/Staff Psychologist/Grand Rounds Coordinator
• Thomas J. McMahon, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and in The Child Study Center 

Presenters

Dr. Kammarauche (Uche) Aneni is a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist. She is an assistant professor of child psychiatry, biomedical informatics, and data science. She is the Principal Investigator of the ACCESS Lab at the Yale Child Study Center. The overall goal of her research is to improve access to preventive interventions for adolescents at risk for substance use and mental health problems. Her research interests focus on developing, testing, and implementing preventive digital interventions, particularly culturally informed family-based interventions for racial/ethnic minorities in community-based settings. She is also investigating the utility of digital tools in identifying adolescents at risk for substance use and mental disorders through digital biomarkers and machine learning approaches. Dr. Aneni’s research is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Center for Technology and Behavioral Health, National Institutes of Health (NIH) AIM-AHEAD program, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation.  

Marc Potenza, MD is a board-certified psychiatrist with sub-specialty training and certification in addiction psychiatry. He has trained at Yale University receiving a combined BS/MS with Honors in Molecular Biochemistry and Biophysics and a PhD in Cell Biology, the latter concurrent with the MD through the Medical Scientist Training Program. He completed internship, psychiatric residency and addiction psychiatry fellowship training at Yale. Currently, he is a Professor of Psychiatry, Child Study and Neuroscience at the Yale University School of Medicine where he is Director of the Division on Addictions Research at Yale, the Center of Excellence in Gambling Research, the Yale Research Program on Impulsivity and Impulse Control Disorders, and the Women and Addictive Disorders Core of Women's Health Research at Yale. He is also a Senior Scientist at the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling. He is on the editorial boards of fifteen journals (including editor-in-chief of Current Addiction Reports) and has received multiple national and international awards for excellence in research and clinical care. He has consulted to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, National Registry of Effective Programs, National Institutes of Health, American Psychiatric Association and World Health Organization on matters of addiction.

John Azer, MD, is a staff psychiatrist and the Coordinator of Substance Use Services at the Austen Riggs Center. He received his medical degree from Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in 2015 and completed his psychiatry residency at the University of Virginia in 2019. He is a recent graduate of the fellowship here at Austen Riggs and has written and spoken on the topics of Religion and Psychoanalysis,  Psychopharmacology and Psychoanalysis, and Therapeutic Community Models of Treatment.

Amanda Lowell, PhD is a licensed clinical psychologist, Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School-Baystate, and Assistant Professor Adjunct at the Yale Child Study Center. After spending the first 8 years of her career at the Yale Child Study Center, she recently became the Clinical Director of Baystate Medical Center’s new SAMHSA-funded Center for Young Children and Families in Springfield, Massachusetts. As a true scientist-practitioner, Dr. Lowell’s program of translational research studies the impact of addiction, adversity, and attachment on parental neural, psychological, and behavioral responses to infant cues. She uses an infant mental health framework to apply research these findings to developing and refining interventions for parents with substance use disorders. Her work currently focuses on narrowing the science-to-service gap and supporting the effective, equitable, and accessible implementation of evidence-based practices for parents with addictions in community settings.

Panelists

• Marcus Hass
• Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin, PhD
• Laura Rodriguez

Austen Riggs Center Inc. adheres to the ACCME’s Standards for Integrity and Independence in Accredited Continuing Medical Education. All those at Austen Riggs Center involved in the planning of this activity, including the presenter(s) listed above, report they have no relevant financial relationships with an ineligible company*.

The views and opinions expressed in this presentation are those of the presenter(s) and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of the Austen Riggs Center.

* An ineligible company is any entity whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients.