About Us

People

Director
Josiah “Jody” Rich, MD, MPH

Deputy Director
Traci Green, PhD, MSc

Contact
Alyssa Pellegrini
Research Program Manager
apellegrini@brownhealth.org

The COBRE on Opioids and Overdose is thankful and fortunate for all the people on our team devoted and committed to making an impact on the opioid epidemic. We would like to introduce you to the team.

Faculty

Josiah “Jody” Rich, MD, MPH
Director, COBRE on Opioids and Overdose

dr-richDr. Rich is the principal investigator and director of the COBRE on Opioids and Overdose. He is a professor of medicine and epidemiology at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He is a leader in the fields of opioid use disorder and infectious diseases in incarcerated populations. Dr. Rich has nearly 25 years of experience conducting clinical research related to substance use and infectious diseases among marginalized populations. Dr. Rich continues to provide care to incarcerated patients with HIV and opioid use disorder. For the past year he has served as an expert advisor, along with COBRE deputy director Dr. Traci Green to the Governor’s Overdose Prevention and Intervention Task Force, and has been instrumental in instituting a radical change in the approach to opioid use disorder at the RI Department of Corrections, in which all prisoners with opioid use disorder are offered medication-assisted therapy.

Traci Green, PhD, MSc
Deputy Director, COBRE on Opioids and Overdose

dr-greenDr. Green is the deputy director of the COBRE on Opioids and Overdose and is an associate professor of emergency medicine and epidemiology at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She has carried out epidemiologic studies of illicit drug and nonmedical prescription drug use, sexual and drug-use risk behaviors, and health service utilization of vulnerable populations for over 18 years. She has conducted prescription opioid overdose “outbreak” investigations in three New England communities as part of a CDC-funded research study, and reviewed 13 years of medical examiner cases of opioid overdoses in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Dr. Green is currently involved as Co-I on several NIDA- and CDC-funded studies to design and implement overdose prevention intervention in HIV clinics and the trauma service. Dr. Green and Dr. Rich have multiple prior successful collaborations, including the NIDA-funded study Project SOON (R21), the first federally-funded study to explore the feasibility of intranasal naloxone use by ex-prisoners. She co-founded PrescribetoPrevent.org, which has trained over 30,000 clinicians in overdose prevention and naloxone prescribing. She currently serves as a consultant to the CDC and the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas on responses to the fentanyl crisis.

Executive Committee

The Executive Committee (EC) of the COBRE on Opioids and Overdose is the management team for the COBRE and will monitor overall progress, productivity, finances and Core usage. The EC provides and facilitates additional mentorship for the COBRE Project Leaders. This includes development of mentoring plan, encouraging funding opportunity applications and general support of the COBRE mission. The EC is comprised of the Director, Deputy Director, Core Directors and Core Deputy Directors.

Josiah “Jody” Rich, MD, MPH
COBRE PI/Director

Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, Brown University
Director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights
Attending Physician, The Miriam Hospital

Traci Green, PhD, MSc
COBRE Deputy Director
Translation and Transformation Core Director

Deputy Director, Boston Medical Center Injury Prevention Center
Boston University School of Medicine, Department of Emergency Medicine
Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Epidemiology
The Warren Alpert School of Medicine of Brown University
Rhode Island Hospital

Susan Ramsey, PhD
Deputy Director, Translation and Transformation Core
Rhode Island Hospital
Departments of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and Medicine
The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University
Rhode Island Hospital

dr-ramseySusan Ramsey, PhD is the Director of Research for the Division of General Internal Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital and is an Associate Professor (Research) in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and the Department of Medicine at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Her research focuses primarily on the development and testing of behavioral interventions to address substance use, HIV medication adherence, and HIV prevention. Dr. Ramsey is currently the PI on an NIH-funded grant aimed at developing and testing an intervention to promote the uptake of PrEP among at-risk women during incarceration, followed by linkage to community-based care upon release from incarceration. Dr. Ramsey has a grant from Gilead to provide the medication for that study. She also served as PI on a recently completed NIH-funded study that examined the efficacy of a smartphone app to improve HIV medication adherence. In addition, Dr. Ramsey is a member of the Executive Committee and Deputy Director of the Translational and Transformative Core of the COBRE Center on Opioids and Overdose. She serves as the primary mentor for a CTR award, K award, and COBRE project for Kirsten Langdon, PhD, all of which focus on using technology to keep patients with opioid use disorder engaged in medication-assisted treatment. Dr. Ramsey is a Co-Investigator on grants aimed at increasing naloxone and buprenorphine prescribing among HIV care providers and examining the impact of peer navigation in the Emergency Department following opioid overdose. She is also a standing member of the NIH HIV/AIDS Intra-and Inter-personal Determinants and Behavioral Interventions Study Section.

Brandon DL Marshall, PhD
Director, Data and Research Methods Core
Department of Epidemiology
Brown University School of Public Health

dr-marshallDr. Marshall is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health. Broadly, Dr. Marshall’s research focuses on substance use epidemiology, infectious diseases, and the social, environmental, and structural determinants of health of drug-using populations. He also serves as an expert advisor to Governor Raimondo’s Overdose Prevention and Intervention Task Force, and is the Scientific Director of PreventOverdoseRI, Rhode Island’s drug overdose dashboard.

Michelle McKenzie, MPH
Director of Community Engagement
The Miriam Hospital
Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Disease

mckenzie-michelleMichelle McKenzie, MPH is Director of Community Engagement with the COBRE on Opioids and Overdose at Rhode Island Hospital. She is a Research Associate with the Brown Alpert Medical School and has been conducting harm reduction and overdose prevention research for more than 15 years. In 2006, she co-founded Preventing Overdose and Naloxone Intervention (PONI), a program dedicated to overdose prevention education and naloxone distribution. She sits on the Governor’s Overdose Prevention and Intervention Task Force and co-chairs the Rescue Working Group. She is a person in long-term recovery.

Advisory Committee

The Advisory Committee (AC) of the COBRE on Opioids and Overdose’s primary role is to participate in COBRE evaluation, including an evaluation of the Project Leaders’ progress, the effectiveness of the COBRE mentorship, and the usefulness of Core services. AC members have been chosen for their robust backgrounds as investigators and mentors, their expertise in addiction medicine, and areas of expertise that are complementary to the COBRE projects and underrepresented among Executive Committee and Advisory Committee members. AC members serve three year-long terms.

Bharat Ramratnam, MD is chief science officer at Brown Health, medical director of the Brown Health Clinical Research Center, and vice chair of research for the department of medicine at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, with appointments in the divisions of infectious diseases and hematology/oncology. He also leads the laboratory of retrovirology for the Brown Health/Tufts/Brown Center for AIDS Research and Rhode Island Hospital’s NIH-funded COBRE Center for Cancer Research Development.

In his role as chief science officer, Dr. Ramratnam provides scientific guidance to the vice president for research administration and to senior Brown Health management on matters of biomedical and translational science. In addition, he serves as co-chair of Brown Health’s Research Advisory Committee, helps determine the goals and status of institutional core labs, and advises on the ongoing laboratory space management and new construction.

Dr. Ramratnam received his bachelor’s and medical degrees from Brown University; and completed his internal medicine residency and chief residency at The Miriam Hospital. He was a clinical scholar at Rockefeller University in New York and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in virology at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Rockefeller University in New York.

Dr. Ramratnam has received numerous awards including the NIH Career Development Award, the Doris Duke Clinical Scientist Award, the Daland Fellowship in Clinical Investigation from the American Philosophical Society, and the Culpepper Award from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Locally, he received the Brown Health Bruce Selya award for Research Excellence and the Dean’s Teaching Excellence Award from the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He serves as a permanent member of the NIH AIDS Immunology and Pathogenesis Study Section.

Dr. Ramratnam’s current research focuses on host factors that impact HIV-1 replication, including histone metabolism and noncoding RNA. His laboratory has made important contributions in multiple fields including virology, basic RNA biology, extra-cellular communication and translational research.

Jason T. Machan, ScM, PhD, is the director of the Brown Health BERD Core and supplies methodological and biostatistical consulting for COBRE Center for Antimicrobial Resistance and Therapeutic Discovery as a member of the Administrative Core.

He is an assistant professor of orthopaedics and surgery at The Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University. He is also adjunct assistant professor of psychology at the University of Rhode Island, through which he directs a biostatistics externship. He has extensive training and experience in experimental methodology and statistics.

As director of BERD Core, Dr. Machan has collaborated with researchers on a broad array of basic, clinical and translational projects, ranging from large-scale clinical trials to retrospective chart reviews and basic science; from quality of life metrics to gene expression. He assists in study design and methodology, instrument selection, statistical analysis planning, sample size selection and power analysis, grantsmanship, data visualization, results write-up, and contextualized interpretation.

Robert Schwartz, MD
Chair, Friends Research Institute

Dr. Schwartz is a psychiatrist and Medical Director of the Friends Research Institute. He is also an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he served as the Director of its Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse. He is Co-Principal Investigator of the Mid-Atlantic Node of the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network (CTN). Through numerous National Institute on Drug Abuse grant awards, he has studied pharmacotherapy for opioid use disorder in the community and in correctional settings. He recently served as the Chair of the SAMHSA’s Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP 63) on Medications for Opioid Use Disorder. Many of Dr Schwartz’s over 160 scientific publications are focused on substance use in primary care and on the treatment of OUD.

Jennifer Havens, PhD, MPH
University of Kentucky College of Medicine
Department of Behavioral Science
Center on Drug and Alcohol Research

Jennifer Havens received her Ph.D. in Infectious Diseases Epidemiology and Master’s of Public Health (M.P.H.) from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kentucky. Dr. Havens has been on faculty in the Department of Behavioral Science and Center on Drug and Alcohol Research at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine since 2004.

During that time she has maintained an active research agenda examining the medical consequences of the opioid epidemic. Dr. Havens and colleagues published some of the earliest reports in the scientific literature on the opioid crisis in rural Appalachia, and the infectious complications (hepatitis C) that followed. She has been continuously funded by NIH since 2008, and was recently awarded $15 million dollars from NIH to conduct a hepatitis C treatment study in Perry County.

Judith Tsui, MD, MPH
University of Washington School of Medicine
Director, UW MedStAR (R25) Program
Associate Director, UW Addiction Medicine Fellowship
Co-director, Harborview Medical Center Opioid Treatment Network
tsuij@uw.edu
office: (206) 744-1835

Dr. Judith Tsui is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington (UW), based at Harborview Medical Center and Evergreen Treatment Services in Seattle, WA. She is an Addiction Medicine certified physician and researcher, with decades of experience providing medications for substance use disorders and hepatitis C treatment in primary care and opioid treatment program settings. Her NIH-funded research is focused on improving health outcomes for persons with substance use disorders through innovations in care delivery and pharmacotherapies. Dr. Tsui is committed to educating the next generation of Addiction Medicine physician researchers as the PI/Director of the NIDA R25 funded UW Medical Students Addiction Research (“MedStAR”) program and Associate Director of the UW Addiction Medicine fellowship.

Staff

Alyssa Pellegrini
Research Program Manager

apellegrini@brownhealth.org