Alexander Cowell directs 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 the Opioid Response Network (ORN), on which RTI is a subcontractor to the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. This project is SAMHSA’s largest funded training and technical assistance contract to apply evidence-based practices in prevention, treatment, and recovery to meet needs identified by local health care providers and agencies. On ORN, RTI will analyze technical assistance participant and event data to create a series of data briefs, infographics, and data spotlights.
Dr. Cowell also leads a multi-institutional working group as part of a coordinating center of a major National Institutes of Health initiative on the prevention of opioid misuse among youth and young adults. He 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.
