Department
Pharmacy Practice
Education and Training
- PharmD–2013
- MPH, Epidemiology–2013
- PhD–2018
- NIDA T32 Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Addiction–2018
Research and Scholarly Interests
I am an Associate Professor with Tenure in the Departments of Pharmacy Practice (primary), Biomedical Informatics (secondary) and Psychiatry (secondary) at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). At UAMS, I serve as the Office of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention (OADAP) Professor and Deputy Director of the HRSA-funded Rural Telehealth Evaluation Center. I also have a joint appointment with the VA where I am a Research Health Scientist and Clinical Pharmacist at the VA HSR (COIN) Center for Mental Healthcare and Outcomes Research (CeMHOR) at the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System in Little Rock, Arkansas. My overarching research goal is to improve the prevention and treatment of substance use disorders by generating clinically actionable knowledge from “big data” that informs clinical practice and improves care and policy. I have published >50 peer-reviewed papers in this topic area. I have also been a PI and Co-I of several federally funded studies using secondary data sources including NIH, VA, and HRSA. Currently, I have a VA HSR Career Development Award-2 to develop a predictive model for buprenorphine discontinuation among veterans; adapting the predictive model into a clinical decision support tool using feedback derived from qualitative interviews with providers, operational partners, and veterans; and piloting the clinical decision support tool among waivered providers in hopes of improving veteran retention on buprenorphine (20-231). I also currently leading the NIDA CTN-0142 protocol to rapidly and cost-effectively identify Veteran characteristics that may give insight into personalizing MOUD care at the individual Veteran level. I am also a licensed clinical pharmacist with experience in treating adults with mental health and substance use disorders, having worked on the inpatient team for the psychiatric intensive care units at a local, large, non-profit hospital.