Samuel A. Ball Of Yale University Elected President And Chief Executive Of The National Center On Addiction And Substance Abuse

Center Expands Mission To Include All Addictions And Addictive Behaviors

NEW YORK, Nov. 14, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Board of Directors of The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse elected Samuel A. Ball, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, to be the Center's President and Chief Executive Officer.  The Board also expanded The Center's mission to encompass all addictions and addictive behaviors including not only those involving nicotine, alcohol, and illegal and prescription drugs, but also obesity and eating disorders, compulsive gambling and sexual addictions.

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Dr. Ball, an expert in drug and alcohol addiction, is Assistant Chair and director of faculty development programs for Yale's Department of Psychiatry.  He is also the Research and Scientific Director of its Psychotherapy Development Research Center, of the Women's Health and Addictive Behavior Faculty Scholars Program, and of the APT Foundation, one of the largest non-profit providers of substance abuse treatment in Connecticut (which was founded in 1968 by Herbert D. Kleber, MD, who later helped Joseph A. Califano, Jr. establish CASA in 1992). 

Dr. Ball has been principal investigator and co-investigator on numerous National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded psychotherapy clinical trials.  He is the developer of Dual Focus Schema Therapy for addicted patients with personality disorders.  He led the implementation of the national train-the-trainer model for Motivational Interviewing in NIDA's Clinical Trial's Network (CTN), where he served as the national chair of the CTN Training Committee overseeing activities of directors of training at academic research and training centers across the country. 

Dr. Ball will retain his faculty appointment at Yale Medical School, while leading The Center's activities and expansion, and developing affiliations with Yale University and its faculty researchers in Psychiatry, Internal Medicine, Emergency Medicine, Public Health and the Yale Child Study Center, who are conducting research on substance use disorders, gambling, obesity and eating disorders.

With Dr. Ball's leadership, The Center plans to establish relationships with many centers at Yale, including the Yale Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science, Center of Excellence in Gambling Research, Translational Center for Gender Sensitive Treatments for Tobacco, Psychotherapy Development Center, Clinical Trials Network, Center for Translational Neuroscience of Alcoholism, Women's Health Research at Yale, VA Alcohol Research and Treatment Centers, the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, The Consultation Center, and Yale's international addiction research programs.

Under Dr. Ball, The Center will strengthen its mission of translating the scientific findings of scholars and scientific researchers about addictions and addictive behaviors into clinical health care and public health practice, public policy to guide justice, education, social service and other public systems.  The Center will develop practical ideas to help corporations improve productivity and families raise children healthy and free of addictive behaviors and addictions, in order to prevent and treat such conditions as drug dependence, obesity, eating disorders, and gambling and sexual compulsions. 

"The selection of Sam Ball is the result of a year long national search.  Sam is the ideal leader to take The Center to its next phase of development and lead its dedicated staff.  We look forward to continuing to work with all institutions that support our mission," said board Chair Jeffrey B. Lane. 

"Twenty-two years ago CASA broke new ground to point out that addiction and abuse of all substances was causing or aggravating just about every social problem the nation faced.  Today under Sam Ball, CASA again breaks new ground, building on recent science, to tackle all addictions and addictive behaviors including those involving compulsive eating,, gambling, and sexual behavior," said Joseph A. Califano, Jr., CASA's founder and chair of the search committee. 

SOURCE The National Center on Addiction & Substance Abuse