Jeff Boissoneault, PhD serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Minnesota, where he directs the Minnesota Alcohol and Pain Lab. Dr. Boissoneault’s research interests focus on neurophysiological and psychosocial mechanisms underling the bidirectional association between pain and substance use, especially alcohol. He is also actively involved in studies regarding cortical-brainstem-spinal interactions underlying placebo analgesia and non-pharmacologic approaches to improve pain modulatory capacity in people with chronic widespread musculoskeletal pain. He received his doctorate in medical sciences with a concentration in cognitive/behavioral neuroscience from the University of Florida and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in pain research in the University of Florida’s Center for Pain Research and Behavioral Health.

Karen Chartier, PhD studies social, genetic and environmental factors that influence alcohol misuse and alcohol use disorder, and how these relationships manifest across racial, ethnic and cultural groups. Her research seeks to optimize the use of family health history information to identify at-risk young adults prior to the development of advanced alcohol problems.

Chartier’s research agenda extends across disciplines. She is the director of the Institute for Research on Behavioral and Emotional Health and the Spit for Science Registry, two university-level initiatives that bring together faculty, trainees and students from across campuses and units at VCU to advance the scientific understanding of substance use and misuse and mental well-being. She is also a faculty member with the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics.

Chartier was trained as a macro social work practitioner. She previously worked as a community organizer and then a project coordinator and evaluator on intervention studies that examined culturally relevant substance use treatment and prevention programs for African American and Latinx communities. She completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine’s Alcohol Research Center in the Department of Psychiatry.

Before VCU, Chartier worked at the University of Texas School of Public Health, Dallas Regional Campus, where she was on the research faculty and conducted epidemiologic studies on alcohol consumption, alcohol-related problems and treatment utilization in U.S. racial/ethnic groups. She was also affiliated with the Texas Node of the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Clinical Trials Network at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

Jessica E. Salvatore, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Department of Psychiatry and the Director of the Genes, Environments, and Neurodevelopment in Addictions Research Program. She also serves as a Field Editor for the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, and on the Board of Directors for the Research Society on Alcohol. Her background is in developmental psychology and psychiatric and behavior genetics, and her primary area of focus is on how alcohol use and related behaviors affect and are affected by close relationships across the lifespan. She takes a genetically informed perspective in her work, with a particular interest in understanding the social/environmental mechanisms through which genetic predispositions for alcohol use disorder and related outcomes are transmitted in families, as well as the interplay between social and genetic factors. Identifying modifiable social and environmental contexts that transmit and amplify genetic predispositions is critical to developing preventive interventions to mitigate the social costs of alcohol-related problems for individuals, families, and society. Dr. Salvatore’s work is funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Templeton Foundation, and she was the recipient of the 2018 Research Society on Alcohol Early Career Investigator Award.