Featured Speaker: 

SAMHSA Administrator Dr. Miriam Delphin-Rittmon

Sergio Aguilar Gaxiola, MD, PhD

Latino Behavioral Health Equity 

Opening Keynote: Thursday, Sept 16 8am PST / 11am EST

Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, MD, PhD is Professor of Clinical Internal Medicine, School of Medicine, University of California, Davis. He is a member of the National Advisory Council of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) - Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS), and over the last two decades, he has held several World Health Organization (WHO) and Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) advisory board and consulting appointments. Dr. Aguilar-Gaxiola’s applied research program has focused on identifying unmet mental health needs and associated risk and protective factors to better understand and meet population mental health needs and achieve equity in health and mental health disparities in underserved populations.

Margarita Alegría, PhD

Health Disparities

2nd Day Keynote: Friday, Sept. 17, 2021 8am PST / 11am EST

Margarita Alegría, PhD is the Chief of the Disparities Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Mongan Institute, the Harry G. Lehnert, Jr. and Lucille F. Cyr Lehnert Endowed Chair at the Mass General Research Institute and a Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on the improvement of health care services delivery for diverse racial/ethnic groups, conceptual and methodological issues with multicultural populations, and ways to bring the community’s perspective into the design and implementation of health services. Dr. Alegría is the PI of four National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded research studies.

Nora Volkow, MD

Collision of the Opioid Crisis and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Closing Keynote: Friday, Sept. 17 11:30am PST / 2:30 EST

Nora D. Volkow, M.D., is the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which supports most of the world’s research on the health aspects of drug abuse and addiction. Dr. Volkow’s scientific research was instrumental in demonstrating that drug addiction is a disease of the human brain and, as NIDA Director, her work has promoted research that improves the prevention and treatment of substance use disorders. As a research psychiatrist, Dr. Volkow pioneered the use of brain imaging to investigate the toxic and addictive effects of abusable drugs. Her studies documented disruption of the dopamine system in addiction with its consequential functional impairment of frontal brain regions involved with motivation, executive function and self-regulation.