Dr. Shauna Acquavita is a Professor and MSW Director at the School of Social Work. She has a decade of social work experience working with individuals who have been diagnosed with mental health and substance use disorders. Her research focuses on substance use disorders including tobacco use among vulnerable populations, specifically pregnant women.  

Dr. Caroline Freiermuth is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine. Her research has focused on managing pain while minimizing risks, including the risk of opioid use disorder. Dr. Freiermuth's expertise in treatment for opioid use disorder and harm reduction has been recognized through her roles on multiple active grants. She serves as a Co-investigator on the NIDA HEALing communities study, acting as a facilitator for implementing new programs for prevention and treatment of opioid use disorder in emergency departments across the state of Ohio. As the principal investigator of the Emergency Department Comprehensive Care grant, awarded by the Ohio Department of Health, Dr. Freiermuth leads the coordination of expanded services for persons with opioid use disorder across local health systems, ensuring that emergency departments are adequately identifying those at risk for the disease and have the needed resources and protocols to treat these patients. Dr. Freiermuth recently enrolled over 1300 hundred patients from three emergency departments into a pharmacogenomics study, funded by the Ohio Attorney General's office. Through this study, she seeks to identify genetic markers associated with opioid use disorder, with the long term goal of running trials to determine if identifying this risk before opioid exposure can decrease the risk of developing opioid use disorder.  

Dr. Blackard currently directs a translational research laboratory which focuses on human and mechanistic studies to understand the interactions between various viral pathogens. At present, laboratory studies involve hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), hepatitis E virus (HEV), pegiviruses (HPgV; GBV-C), BK polyomavirus, and HIV and include international collaborations in South Africa, Botswana, India, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Ghana. My NIDA-funded research focuses on the impact of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl on HIV disease.  

Dr. Manchak’s work examines the effectiveness of programs and policies for individuals in the criminal justice system who have mental illness and/or substance use disorder. Since 2012, she has been an external evaluator (PI) on several different projects that focus on justice-involved individuals with opioid addiction, specifically. This includes 4 evaluations of SAMHSA-funded programs affiliated with the local drug court, 2 evaluations of the Hamilton County Quick Response Team, and 1 evaluation of the Hamilton County Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program. In her own investigator-led research that focuses more specifically on serious mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression), she examines the influence of substance use on clinical and criminal outcomes. She has also conducted a study of practitioners in Hamilton County (EMS, treatment, law enforcement/corrections) to examine the personal and professional impact of the opioid crisis.  

Dr. Ashley Merianos has extensive training and experience in the epidemiology and prevention of substance use with an emphasis on tobacco, quantitative statistical methods, and clinical and translational research in the pediatric healthcare setting. She is a Certified Health Education Specialist and Tobacco Treatment Specialist. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has successfully funded Dr. Merianos’ research as a Principal Investigator (K01DA044313 and R21ES032161). Her current K01 project measures the health and economic burden of child tobacco smoke exposure including secondhand and thirdhand smoke on the acute healthcare setting and creates an implementation plan to reduce exposure in a future trial. Dr. Merianos' current R21 project examines the prevalence, contributions, and health risks of exposure to tobacco smoke and electronic cigarette aerosol among children nationwide. She serves as a Co-Investigator on two active NIH research projects (R01ES027815 and R01ES030743) that focus on parental tobacco cessation and child tobacco smoke exposure reduction in the acute healthcare and inpatient settings, and assessment of complex tobacco smoke toxicant mixtures within microenvironments (e.g., homes). Dr. Merianos’ research program has contributed to the tobacco control field by identifying the multiple pathways through which nonsmoking children are exposed to tobacco smoke and evaluating policies aimed at protecting this highly vulnerable population from related harmful effects.  

Dr. Schultz has conducted NIH/NIDA-, AHA- and PhRMA Foundation-funded studies, spanning 15+ years, focused on the cardiovascular outcomes of acute or chronic opioid/opiate use. She and her PhD graduate mentor are acknowledged as the pioneers in the field of acute opioid use in cardiac ischemia-reperfusion injury, which has resulted multiple “therapeutic use” patents and consulting opportunities. Dr. Schultz’s research has contributed to our understanding of the effects of opioid/opiate use and use disorder in ischemic heart disease or heart failure outcomes.  

Kenneth Sherman, MD, PhD is a hepatologist and virologist with a diverse research agenda focused on viral hepatitis natural history, immunology, diagnostics, prevention, and treatment. Much of his work involves immunosuppressed, at-risk populations with HIV. He has been continuously funded by NIH and other federal agencies since the 1990s and has held leadership positions in the NIAID AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), the American Gastroenterological Association and the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease. Dr. Sherman’s research effort has helped define the significance and management of viral liver disease in persons living with HIV and provided the groundwork for current public health screening measures for viral hepatitis in the U.S. and worldwide.  

Dr. Wexelblatt is a pediatrician and researcher focused on improving perinatal health outcomes in regional populations.  He is  currently the Regional Director of Newborn Services for Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) Perinatal Institute, which serves eight level 2 hospitals and three level 1 nurseries in our region.  As the regional faculty representative for the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association (OCHA) subcommittee on Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS), he helped establish a protocol for NAS for twenty Ohio children’s and maternity hospitals.  He led in the reporting of key findings from OCHA demonstrating that improved outcomes for NAS following an infant’s in-utero exposure to opioids could be achieved through the utilization of standard treatment protocols with stringent weaning guidelines. Subsequently, he co-led the analysis and writing of a follow-up study reporting improvement in NAS outcomes after adoption of the collaborative guidelines. Building upon his work with the OCHA collaborative, he served as a primary or co-investigator in several additional regional analyses designed to provide evidence for further optimizing NAS guidelines. Analyses of outcomes following methadone versus buprenorphine weaning and a comparative effectiveness evaluation of conventional methadone weaning versus weaning with a pharmacokinetic modeled methadone protocol were published.  He is currently participating as a faculty member of the Ohio Perinatal Quality Collaboration (OPQC) disseminating our findings to 53 delivery hospitals in Ohio to improve the care of the opioid exposed infant.  Through their statewide collaborations of OCHA and OPQC, they have created a standardized protocol to safely decrease the length of stay.  They have also showed that a pharmacokinetic modeled taper reduced length of stay by three days, and that buprenorphine may be a safe and more effective option for pharmacologic treatment in the setting of NAS.  

Dr. Wheeler is an assistant professor of Clinical Psychology. Her research focuses on drug use, treatment for drug use disorders, and associated health disparities among Black Americans. Her work seeks to identify cultural strengths that can facilitate drug use treatment effectiveness, retention, and overall improvement of treatment approaches in the context of structural barriers that disproportionately affect Black Americans. Dr. Wheeler also examines understudied drug use patterns among Black Americans that inform unmet health needs, such as nonmedical use of prescription drugs. Ultimately, Dr. Wheeler aims to utilize this research to develop and implement culturally congruent drug use interventions that will improve drug use outcomes in Black communities.  

Dr. Winhusen has conducted NIDA-funded clinical trials for the past 20 years devoted to improving the treatment of substance use disorders including opioid, cocaine, and tobacco use disorders. He is one of the foremost experts in conducting multi-site addiction trials in clinical settings, having served as the national PI for six National Drug Abuse Clinical Trials Network trials. Dr. Winhusen’s research has contributed to our understanding of co-occurring disorders (e.g., tobacco use disorder with ADHD and with stimulant use disorders), the treatment of pregnant substance abusers, and the neurocognitive functioning of individuals with stimulant use disorders.