I am the Program Director for an ACGME accredited Addiction Medicine Fellowship at East Tennessee State University. Our team is an engaged, intense, eager group of people with an unbridled commitment to helping others find their way through the tangled relationships they have with substances and maladaptive behavioral responses to a place of acceptance, healing and hope. We do this by being a team of talented and dedicated interprofessionals. Currently we have certified peer recovery specialists, social workers (LCSW, LBSW, LMSW), certified medical assistants, board certified psychiatrists, preventive medicine and family medicine physicians who are double boarded in Addiction Medicine via the ABPM, social work students, family medicine and psychiatry residents, and medical students contributing to this stellar team.

I began my career in an FQHC in southwestern New Mexico. I am, however, from East Tennessee, but there were no sites that qualified for my NHSC Scholarship requirements closer to home. The 10 years I spent in a rural, frontier community served me well in the work I do now. Working as a team meant survival in the resource-poor and sparsely populated corner of one of the poorer states in the Union. While there, I helped to create the first Teaching Health Center Residency Program in New Mexico. With the knowledge and expertise gained from creating that program, I was in good standing to develop the Addiction Medicine Fellowship in Johnson City, TN. The Fellowship was created to train addictionologists, but additionally, it is here to increase the understanding of, compassion for and use of evidence-based standards in the treatment of substance use disorders and behavioral addictions.