David R. Gastfriend, MD

David R. Gastfriend, MD is Director of the Addiction Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He founded the Fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry at the MGH and continues to teach and provide outpatient substance abuse clinical care at the MGH. He is one of the few physicians in the country to be certified both in Addiction Medicine by the American Society of Addiction Medicine and in Addiction Psychiatry by the American Board of Neurology and Psychiatry. Dr. Gastfriend has conducted studies of both pharmacologic and behavioral treatments of alcohol and drug use disorders. He initiated the first multi-site study to validate and refine the Patient Placement Criteria published by the American Society of Addiction Medicine, for which he has been funded for seven years by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He was a Co-Principal Investigator on the National Institute on Drug Abuse's Cocaine Collaborative Psychotherapy Study and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism's collaborative study COMBINE. In COMBINE, he was chair of the Assessment Committee and the Publications and Analysis Committee. He chairs the Treatment Outcome Research Committee of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), is a two-term elected Delegate-At-Large on ASAM's Board and also sits on the Board of the International Society of Addiction Medicine. He is co-editor of the leading book on treatment matching in the field, The ASAM Patient Placement Criteria for Substance-Related Disorders. In 2001 he was the recipient of a five-year Mid-Career Investigator Award for Patient-Oriented Research from NIDA and in 2002 he was nominated for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Award, "Innovators Combating Substance Abuse." He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment and the Journal of Addictive Diseases, and is Associate Editor of the Journal of Computers in Human Services. He is recognized for his work on implementing addictions placement criteria by provider networks, insurers, and state, federal, and international agencies.