Jaffe Named a 2024-25 SUD Systems Performance Scholar
Content
Assistant Professor of Community Health Education Kaitlyn Jaffe has been named a 2024-2025 Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Systems Performance Scholars by The Brandeis-Harvard SPIRE Center. The SUD Systems Performance Scholars Program supports early career scholars who demonstrate an interest in developing a program of addiction health services research through tailored ongoing mentorship from experienced addiction health services researchers. Jaffe is joined in the 2024-25 cohort by Latoya Attis from Yeshiva University and Orrin Ware from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), The Brandeis-Harvard SPIRE Center to Improve System Performance for Substance Use Disorder Treatment is a partnership of the Heller School's Institute for Behavioral Health, part of the Schneider Institutes for Health Policy and Research, and Harvard Medical School's Department of Health Care Policy. The Center focuses on using its research synergistically to advance the science by stimulating research, learning and experimentation; drive the next generation of research; serve as a national resource for researchers, policymakers, providers and other stakeholders; and inform policy decisions that will have profound effects on the cost, quality and availability of SUD treatment services.
“I am honored to be selected as a Brandeis-Harvard SPIRE Center SUD Systems Performance Scholar,” says Jaffe. “As an early career researcher, I look forward to the mentorship offered through this program while I seek to build my expertise in health services research, substance use treatment systems, and grantsmanship. And as a new resident of Massachusetts, I am eager to meet and learn from leading scholars in the substance use treatment field from across the state and beyond.”
Jaffe, who joined the SPHHS faculty in 2023, is a medical sociologist investigating the social, structural, and ethical issues surrounding randomized controlled trials (RCTs) for substance use disorders as well as inequities in access to medications for opioid use disorder. She is currently the project lead on a NIDA-funded project through Fordham University concerning the ethical considerations among RCT staff in substance use research and is also a co-investigator on a NIDA-funded study that aims to increase access to HIV prevention and care for people with opioid use disorder in Massachusetts jails.