Scientific Panel
Lee Ann Kaskutas, Dr.PH.
Lee Ann Kaskutas is a senior scientist and the director of training at Alcohol Research Group (ARG) of the Public Health Institute in Emeryville, California.
Since starting at ARG in 1990, Dr. Kaskutas has focused her research efforts on solutions to alcohol-related problems that do not require professionally-trained individuals for implementation. For example, she conducted two NIH-funded clinical trials that compared the costs and outcomes of clinical and social model treatment programs. Currently, she is studying the long-term Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) "careers" of treated and untreated substance abusers and how their involvement with AA relates to abstinence. With funding from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), she also developed a group-oriented, manual-guided intervention program designed to increase patient involvement with AA.
In addition to regularly publishing peer-reviewed journal articles of studies funded by NIAAA and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Dr. Kaskutas oversees the training of the field’s future researchers. As adjunct associate professor at U.C. Berkeley's School of Public Health, she teaches the department's core survey research methods course and co-instructs the longstanding Advanced Alcohol Research Seminar. As ARG's director of training, she also serves as the principal investigator of the NIAAA-funded training grant “Graduate Research Training on Alcohol Problems”.
In 2007, Dr. Kaskutas was awarded the American Society of Addiction Medicine’s R. Brinkley Smithers Distinguished Scientist Award for her contributions to the field of addiction medicine. She also received the Research Society on Alcoholism's Young Investigator Award in 1998.
Dr. Kaskutas holds a doctorate in public health from the University of California, Berkeley.
