Alexander Cowell serves as the program director for RTI’s Behavioral Health Financing, Economics and Evaluation program. In this role he evaluates interventions and policies to improve people’s behavioral health. Dr. Cowell contributes to a coordinating center of a major National Institutes of Health initiative on the prevention of opioid misuse among youth and young adults. He also recently led the impact and reporting task of the largest technical assistance project in the Department of Health and Human Services to address the opioid crisis.
Dr. Cowell recently served as director of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s cross-site evaluation of its flagship Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment program, which addresses substance use across the continuum. Dr. Cowell has also completed and published the results of numerous economic evaluations applied to interventions and programs such as alcohol interventions among college students, services for homeless people, and criminal justice diversion programs for people with substance abuse co-occurring with mental health disorders.
