2024 Speakers and Bios

Ann Dowsett Johnston is the bestselling author of Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, named one of the top 10 books of 2013 by The Washington Post. As well, her TEDx talk on the same subject has had more than 1.4 million views. An award-winning journalist with more than four decades of experience, she went back to school at 64 and became a psychotherapist. As well, Ann runs the popular international memoir-writing course--Writing Your Recovery. Ann has been honored countless times for her work on addiction and mental health, including an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University. She lives in Toronto, Canada—but escapes to Los Angeles as often as possible to see her beloved granddaughter.

Khadi A. Oluwatoyin is a New York attorney and the founder of Sober Black Girls Club (SBGC), a collective that provides support and resources to Black girls, women, and gender-expansive people practicing sobriety, in recovery or considering it. Oluwatoyin created SBGC in October of 2018 after noticing her own struggles with alcohol and the lack of socially and culturally-competent support for Black folks working towards sobriety. At the time, SBGC was just a blog. Today, it is a coast-to-coast, 501(c)(3) collective that, in addition to the blog, provides its members with a newsletter, mentorship program, support meetings, and more.

Dr. White has a background in biological psychology and is interested in how alcohol affects health, from single cells to societies. He received a PhD from Miami University in Ohio, completed postdoctoral training at Duke University Medical Center, and then served as an Assistant Professor at Duke before being joining NIAAA in 2008. Dr. White has been studying alcohol for 30 years. Along the way, he helped develop several prevention strategies, including AlcoholEdu, a widely used online science-focused program for high school and college students. He has delivered several hundred presentations related to alcohol and health to academic and lay audiences around the globe, and has published more than 70 scientific articles and book chapters on the subject. Dr. White became interested in the topic of alcohol and women’s health after attending a presentation by author and therapist, Ann Dowsett Johnston, in 2012.

Valerie A. Earnshaw, Ph.D. is a social psychologist whose research focuses on understanding and addressing associations between stigma and health inequities across the lifespan. Her research has explored how stigma leads to substance use and undermines recovery from substance use disorders. She has also contributed to interventions to reduce stigma towards people with substance use disorders as well as to help people decide whether and how to disclose their recovery to others. She was invited to present the NIH Office of Disease Prevention Early-Stage Investigator Lecture (2019) and is the recipient of the Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest from the American Psychological Association (2020). Dr. Earnshaw is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Delaware.

Christina Lee received her PhD from New York University in 2002 and completed a NIH T32 funded postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Addictions and Alcohol Research, Brown University, in 2004. The goal of her research, which tailors interventions by addressing social and structural determinants that affect substance use among culturally diverse individuals, is to promote health equity in addictions treatment and policy. As an early career investigator she developed a stigma mitigation intervention (CASMI) that incorporated social determinants into her treatment for Latine adults; it was tested in a large scale RCT. She is currently NIH funded to conduct a Type I Hybrid Effectiveness-Implementation study to test the CASMI, delivered by community health workers to Black and Latine primary care patients, to reduce harms related to substance use. She serves as Senior Editor for the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, is on the Editorial Advisory Board for Alcohol Research: Current Reviews, the NIAAA journal, and on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. She teaches Substance Use and Treatment and focuses on consequences and causes of substance use as a social justice issue.

Dr. McCrady is internationally known for her NIH-supported work on empirically supported treatments for substance use disorder (SUD). She created and tested one of the first cognitive-behavioral SUD treatment programs at Brown University and has developed and tested an original, conjoint treatment model for persons with SUD and their spouses. Dr. McCrady has been a leader in bringing scientific attention to Alcoholics Anonymous, has conducted controlled research on treatments to integrate 12-step and couples therapy, and research on mechanisms of change in family-involved treatment and 12-step oriented treatment. She also has conducted controlled research evaluating alternative treatment models for women with alcohol and other SUDs, brief family-involved addiction treatment, and treatments for substance dependent criminal justice system populations. With her colleague Elizabeth Epstein, in 2023 she published a new therapist guide and client workbook for group therapy for women with SUD. Her current research focuses on and neurocognitive and behavioral mechanisms of change in recovery from alcohol use disorder. Dr. McCrady is a past-president of RSA.

Dr. Kimberly Nixon is Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology, James T. Doluisio Centennial Fellow, and Director of an NIAAA-funded T32 training grant at The University of Texas at Austin. She received a B.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology (Behavioral Neuroscience) at UT-Austin. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, she accepted a faculty position at the University of Kentucky where she rose through the ranks to full professor. In 2018, she was recruited home to UT-Austin where her laboratory continues to lead the field in studying alcohol’s effects on neural stem cells and adult neurogenesis as well as make provocative discoveries on the role of neuroimmune signaling in alcohol effects on brain and behavior across the lifespan. Dr. Nixon’s novel approach to studying alcohol-induced neurodegeneration and recovery has been continuously funded by the NIAAA for over 15 years and received numerous awards including the 2008 Research Society on Alcoholism Young Investigator Award and a 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) awarded by President Barack Obama. Dr. Nixon is an active member of the Research Society on Alcohol and Society for Neuroscience.

Dr. Roberto received her BA (1996) in Biological Sciences and her Ph.D. (2001) in Neuroscience from The University of Pisa, Italy. In 2001 she joined TSRI as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Siggins’ laboratory, and started her studies on alcohol and other drugs of abuse. In 2005, she started her own laboratory at TSRI, where she has continued to identify how stress and alcohol alter neuronal function and synaptic transmission in the amygdala. Among the awards that Dr. Roberto has received are the Young Investigator Award from RSA (2005) and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) (2009), and the Jacob P. Waletzky Award from the Society for Neuroscience (2016) for her significant conceptual and empirical contributions to the understanding of drug addiction. She advocates for the development of research collaborations with international colleagues world-wide and for equity in science, she seeks to increase opportunities for junior scientists, and work to increase interactions between preclinical and clinical researchers to provide translational insights for targeted strategies to alleviate AUD symptomatology.

Jillian R. Scheer, PhD, is a licensed counseling psychologist, the Cobb-Jones Professor of Clinical Psychology, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Syracuse University. Dr. Scheer is also a research affiliate at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at the Yale School of Public Health and at the VA Center for Integrated Healthcare Research Affiliate at the Syracuse VA Medical Center. Dr. Scheer’s externally-funded research program focuses on identifying biopsychosocial determinants, such as sexual and relationship violence, traumatic stress symptoms, and physiological stress reactivity, of alcohol and other drug use among sexual minority women and transgender and/or nonbinary people. Additionally, Dr. Scheer’s program of research seeks to understand help-seeking barriers and develop scalable and innovative telehealth and digital health interventions tailored to these populations.

Dr. Werner received his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine under the mentorship of Dr. Gregg Homanics where he investigated alcohol and anesthetic mechanisms using genetically modified mouse models. After graduating in 2007, he began a postdoctoral fellowship at the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine under the guidance of Dr. A. Leslie Morrow. During this time, his research efforts were aimed at understanding alcohol-related regulation of the GABA type A receptor system using multiple cellular, biochemical and electrophysiological approaches, as well as the contribution of endogenous sex hormone-derived neuroactive steroids. Dr. Werner began a faculty position in Psychology and Integrative Neuroscience at Binghamton University in upstate New York in 2010. His work has since transitioned towards using rodent models to investigate brain-related contributors to sex differences in the context of developmental priming of alcohol use disorder. Dr. Werner is a member of the NIH-funded Developmental Exposure Alcohol Research Center at Binghamton as well as the Neurobiology of Adolescent Drinking In Adulthood Consortium.

Since joining the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 2007, Dr. Grakalic has promoted and expanded the basic behavioral research program within Division of Neuroscience and Behavior (DNB) by developing initiatives on learning and motivational aspects of alcohol use disorder (AUD). In addition, she participates in several trans-NIH initiatives, including the NIH BRAIN Initiative, the NIH HEAL Initiative, the NIH Basic Behavioral and Social Science Opportunity Network (OppNet), and the NIH-Wide Sex as a Biological Variable (SABV) Working Group. She is also NIAAA’s liaison to the Office of Research on Women's Health (ORWH) and a member of NIH Coordinating Committee on Research on Women’s Health (CCRWH). Most recently, she has served as a co-editor for a special issue of Alcohol Research: Current Reviews dedicated to research on alcohol-related sex differences across a spectrum of outcomes and measures including cognition, psychiatric comorbidities, cancer, cardiovascular disease and sleep disorders. The issue highlighted critical and ongoing sex-specific knowledge gaps in our understanding of the epidemiology of alcohol use, the interplay of physiology and alcohol, and best approaches to prevention and treatment.

Dr. Roach is a general internist with more than 35 years of experience in addiction treatment. Prior to starting her federal career, she served as the Administrator and Medical Director for all government-funded addiction prevention and treatment programs in Washington, D.C., collectively known as the Addiction Prevention and Recovery Administration (APRA). She currently serves as a Program Director in the Division of Treatment, Health Services, and Recovery at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, where, among other responsibilities, she manages research portfolios addressing the treatment of co-occurring mental health and alcohol use disorder and alcohol-related HIV/AIDS among women. Dr. Roach co-chairs the Interagency Work Group on Drinking and Drug Use in Women and Girls, a trans-DHHS committee that promotes collaborative research and other activities focused on the prevention and treatment of substance use and co-occurring mental health disorders among women and girls. She also serves on the Interagency Coordinating Committee on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, the NIH Coordinating Committee for Research on Women’s Health, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Forum on Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders, among many other committee memberships.